358. One Picture, Two Countries, Three Lessons

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Exactly 30 years ago today, I was lucky enough to be in East Berlin on a school trip. How we came to be there I really don’t know but for a fortnight we got a first hand view of the east, that few in the west were privileged to see. For a fortnight we were shown the sights, taken to the Palast Der Republik for cream cakes and (and I’m still not sure whether it was due lax licencing laws or lax shop keeping – possibly both) allowed to spend our money on small bottles of beer from the local supermarket next to our hostel situated between Tierpark zoo and a huge railway shunting yard. For a boy who was just a few days shy of his fifteenth birthday, and who could no way have obtained the same goodies in quite such an open fashion in the UK, this seemed like the height of adulthood of and civilisation. And indeed for my life so far it as proved to be the height of civilisation ;-)

One wet Monday morning we were being taken somewhere across the city on the u-bahn. I noticed that with the exception of our small party, everyone on the train looked thoroughly miserable. Being someone who had always enjoyed train journeys I wondered why, so I asked my teacher who just happened to be sitting next to me. I say, just happened, but it is only with adult hindsight that I realise I’d be the one they probably wanted to keep the closest eye on. Anyway the answer I got would have made Mrs Thatcher and her old pal Ron very happy with the teacher indeed. I was told, in a whispered tone, that the people in this country were repressed by the communist system. They had few opportunities and little freedom. That is why everyone looked so miserable.

Fast forward four years, to a cold wet Monday morning in London. I am sitting on the Circle Line going to work in the city. I look around me and all of my fellow passengers look thoroughly miserable. I feel it to. At that moment I remember the ride on the u-bahn, the faces, the air of depression. It was one and the same. Not for me was this depressed feeling brought about by a political ideology it was quite simply that there are times in life where we all have to go to places we don’t want to, to do things we don’t want to, and those times are often on cold wet Monday mornings.

Lesson Number 1: People interpret things through the lens of their own knowledge and their own experience. The answer given by my teacher was no more right or wrong than how I would later explain the same phenomena, but the same situation made sense to us in different ways.

Whilst in East Germany, we were taken to see the wall from the other side. One of the things that we were told was that we mustn’t wave at the people on the other side. They might take a photo and doctor it so that our friendly wave is made to look like a waving fist. I was quite perplexed. Surely those are our people, why would they want to do a thing like that? Nevertheless we’d be told not to do it, and nobody did.

The next summer I was lucky enough to find myself in Germany again. Not a school trip, but with the Air Cadets on Annual camp to RAF Gűtersloh. Now, Gűtersloh was not a million miles from the border and as part of our visit we were taken to see what wasn’t so much a wall, but a large trench surrounded on both sides by some Steve McQueen style barbed wire fencing. As we approached we were given orders: Do not wave at the people on the other side. They might take a photo and doctor it so that a friendly wave is made to look like a shaking fist.

Lesson Number 2: People on opposite sides may well tell exactly the same stories about each other.

Fast forward again, this time to 9 November1989. Exactly ten years after I was there, those miserable looking people on the u-bahn decided that they’d had enough. The cream cakes and beer weren’t enough and they wanted more to life. The authorities decided too that they no longer had the will or the energy to stop them and so twenty years ago tonight the people of East Berlin broke through the wall and mingled for the first time in decades with friends, with relatives, with total strangers from the west. I wasn’t there on that night, but I like millions of others around the world watched it on the tele. And a thoroughly uplifting experience it was too.

Lesson number 3: Walls and trenches, turrets and guards can make exciting props in the imagination of a boy. But they really aren’t worth curtailing people’s freedom for.

Walls Come Tumbling Down