Cold War Nostalgia, and a few responses

It is one of my greatest regrets that in my long-ago days as Defence Correspondent of Another Newspaper, I was abruptly pulled off a visit to the old Inner German Border by a silly executive. The British Army had happily agreed to conduct me along the extraordinary frontier which then ran between the two Germanies. I think that, with a bit of luck, I might also have secured a ride on the British Military Train which used to run daily between Helmstedt and Berlin to assert our right of passage between the British Zone of Occupation and the British Zone of Berlin. It was said that its dining car still sold meals and drinks at the prices of the 1940s, as its whole legal status was based on agreements from the time of Stalin and the Berlin airlift. For the same reason, flights from West Germany to Berlin in those days had to drop to 10,000 feet, because that was the height of air corridor agreed at that time. Of course, having put my kind hosts out by suddenly departing for what they regarded as no good reason, and so making them abandon elaborate arrangements they'd made for me,  I could never revive the visit.

So I have always had a special affection for Anthony Bailey's account of his own long ramble down the border, 'Along the Edge of the Forest', published back in 1983 and now a museum piece. Bailey is a very interesting writer anyway, and this is – if you are interested at all in such thing -  an unusually fascinating subject.

I read Bailey's book hungrily when it first came out, and then turned to it again (for a long time it had been more or less lost in an obscure corner of my not-very-orderly bookshelves), a few weeks ago. It was so long since I had read it that I had even remembered the colour of the cover wrongly, as brown (the colour, after all, of almost everything in the Soviet zone of influence) when it was in fact green. My brother had recently given me , by complete coincidence, another of Bailey's books, a reminiscence of his upbringing, and this made me all the more anxious to retrieve 'Along the Edge'.

I saw the border from trains and from the air, and I saw, close to, its rather different equivalent in Berlin itself, but the actual demarcation was quiet different. In Berlin, for instance, the traveller in the East could approach quite close to the famous Wall, because it was impossible to hide it at the Brandenburg Gate. In most parts of the city you couldn't do so, as there were internal barriers, but there was still this astonishing sight, a few hundred yards from the Soviet Embassy and the heart of ceremonial East Germany (which was quite grand, as the East had inherited the Unter den Linden, two Cathedrals, several superb museums and a lot of fine Schinkel architecture)  there was this unmistakable thing, lower and broader than elsewhere, curving temptingly towards the Tiergarten in the West. I never saw it from the East without having a ludicrous urge to run towards it and leap over. I had the same daft impulse at the Panmunjom crossing between the Koreas, where there isn't even a wall, just a line that looks absurdly easy to cross.

In East Germany itself, hardly anyone except border troops ever saw the inside of the great fence, with its mines (there were no landmines in Berlin) and its tripwire-triggered automatic guns. There was a three-mile-deep forbidden zone that most people could never enter.

Bailey applied for permission to see it from the East, and did eventually receive it, after he'd already finished his journey. He didn't go, which I think was a great shame. Even the obstruction he'd undoubtedly have received would have made an interesting account, and my experience of travelling in East Germany itself was always very rewarding indeed. Not specially comfortable, though the first-class carriages of the old Deutsche Reichsbahn could be quite comfy, the hotel restaurants could be quite fun once you had got used to the compulsory communal tables, if (like me) you actually quite like heavy overcooked German dishes, and East German sparkling wine, Rotkaeppchen Sekt, was more bearable than you might have thought. And at night it was very, very dark and wonderfully silent, as Pyongyang is today.

I will always be grateful that I managed to see the lovely city of Weimar (and its neighbouring concentration camp at Buchenwald) under Communist rule, not to mention Dresden,  Frankfurt and the almost indescribably haunting and beautiful city of Naumburg, with its unique cathedral. Nothing had been painted or much cared for since Stalingrad. The great wave of money which had Americanised west Germany had never arrived there, and so the traveller was able to see a much more German Germany, in which the rise of Hitler and many other things were far more explicable than they were amid the sparkle and luxury of the comfortable West.

Weimar, with the houses of Goethe and Schiller, and the (in those days) grand but shabby Elephant Hotel, now an unaffordable super-luxury palace, was a rare zone of beauty in a country which generally preferred ugliness, as Communists usually do. Its closeness to Buchenwald, which even in its wholly dishonest East German incarnation, a museum which cut out half of history, was enough to freeze the imagination and fill the visitor with a strange shame in being there to see such things.

Naumburg, whose cathedral contains some of the greatest sculptures ever made by human hand, was so melancholic it was enough to make you cry – under the grey sky, echoing with the sonic booms of Soviet MiGs, Red Army lorries ground along the cobbled streets and in the café the cakes were made out of potatoes and glue, and the coffee made of acorns. This is luxury, beyond the dreams of avarice, if your main interest is in finding out how other people live, how different life might be if things had turned out and how the world beyond your own shores is really like.

But back to Bailey. He covers much of the length of the border, which was not only a fence, but a ploughed strip, an anti-tank ditch, and then another fence, watched over by towers which (he observed) had been so badly built that many of them were falling down. He describes the lives of West Germans who lived close to the line, and also reveals a detail which I found particularly fascinating.

The actual East German border ran some way west of the fence. And in the often untended land in front of it, East German special troops (Aufklaerer, or Pioneers) often lurked (he had one or two close brushes with them). It was quite easy, if you weren't careful, to wander into East Germany, be arrested by these silent, stealthy zealots, and taken against your will through concealed gates, into the dark heart of the DDR. Eventually, they let you go, but how could you be sure? The idea that this was a fence that could bite gave it an added fear, and reminded me a bit of a passage in the Pilgrim's Progress where, quite close to the celestial city, a foul hole opens up in the hillside and some sinner is dragged off into Hell, just when he was sure he was safe. 

Reading the book now, I find it has lost much of its old power because the fence is not just gone, but largely forgotten and unknown. Yet when I first read it, in 1983 or 1984, I could not have imagined that within five or six years the whole thing would have come to an end (and I was convinced even then that German reunification was inevitable eventually). What do we now think is permanent, that will be gone in ten years?

A couple of points.  I should have said that the discussion of the renaming of Bombay can be found under the heading 'Beijing, Mumbai etc' in the index.

Why precisely is it 'patronising drivel' ( as someone calling himself 'Mick' says ) to state that children can be happy and healthy even if their parents are poor?

If I say I am not very good at driving I am not saying that I am actively dangerous to others. Nor do I agree with a critic (whose pseudonym is so silly I can't be bothered to reproduce it) that driving cautiously is in itself dangerous. It may be inconvenient to people in a hurry, but it is by its nature safer than driving without caution. What is more, this person rather misses my implication, that people who do believe they are 'good at ' driving are often in fact just good at being confident. They believe they can brake in time. They believe they can steer through that gap. They believe they can overtake in that gap. They believe they know what is round that corner. They think it will be all right to take that phone call or read that text. They believe that pedestrian will not step out, that cyclist will not wobble. A lot of the time they will turn out to be right ( though in many cases this will be because others see or hear them coming, and slow down, get out of the way or stop to let them by). But I can tell them all (having myself been in a serious road accident more than 40 years ago, though I still recall it in detail now) that in half a second their lives ( and those of several others) can be turned upside down by a tiny miscalculation. A couple of years ago a South Wales police force made an astonishing short film on the dangers of texting while driving, which managed to portray quite eerily the experience of a road accident, including the terrifying silence which falls immediately afterwards, before you dare to look and see what has happened , and before the pain explodes. Everyone should see it. To believe you aren't very good actually makes you better. It is the only responsible thing to do. But of course it should be made much harder to get, and keep a driving licence. If it were, then we would have better public transport and better provision for bicycles.