Café Adler (part 2) WEST BERLIN
Before the Fall
Crossing the Wall
Café Adler was many things to many people. To its customers it was a ‘clean, well-lighted place’, a cafe of the kind Hemingway would have recognised as the real thing. But seen through the binoculars of a nearby East German border guard, stationed just across the Wall, it was a tantalising glimpse of the forbidden West.
Café Adler Friederich Strasse 1982
To cross from one Berlin into its competing neighbour next door, I’d book a seat on the bus that trundled from Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. My morning walk took me across Potsdamer Platz. Before the war this had been one of the busiest intersections in Europe, but it was now a muddy, disconsolate wasteland. Reminders of the cataclysm that destroyed central Berlin were everywhere: the Hitler bunker; fragments of the Gestapo torture chamber in Wilhelm Strasse. Long-abandoned , deserted diplomatic embassies looked like victims of some below-stairs revolt by the proletarian vegetable orders. Rampant creepers clawed their way across stately facades, reaching through smashed windows into empty staterooms. What remained of the once-majestic Anhalter Station, from where sixty trains left each day, bound for Dresden, Rome and Vienna, was now a line of headless statues looking down from a broken pediment.
If West Berlin was haunted by the past, the East was obsessed with a manufactured future. The entity hidden beyond the Wall called itself the German Democratic Republic. An eerie claim to legitimacy always hard to prove. Because the GDR was very uncertainly German, far from democratic and never a republic, but an obedient outpost of the Soviet empire.
As for that monument to the folly of the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie, it was never much to look at. Only in the movies did this ugly , improvised bus stop take on a sinister significance that it never had, in what might be called ‘real’ life. But then, when I walked the eerie streets near Checkpoint Charlie, in the years before the Fall, nothing looked quite real.
After coffee in the Café Adler, I’d climb into the bus and it clattered into no-man’s-land , only to stop almost as soon as it started. The East German border police clambered aboard and demanded our papers. A loud banging underneath the bus told you they were making the ritual mirror check. A long rod, with what looked like a giant dentist’s mirror at one end, was thrust under the bus to examine the underparts for contraband bibles, food, films or stowaways; anything that might be wired to the chassis. I once made the mistake of carrying my lunchtime sandwiches in a purple plastic shopping bag, from the Liberty department store in London. The name on my lunch bag took some explaining to the guards. In the end they confiscated the bag ,with its offending name, but left me my sandwiches. Liverwurst and pickle, two of each, as best I remember.
What often struck me about Café Adler, as I sat over coffee before making another trip across the Wall, was the alarming contrast between the two Berlins. The glitzy, brittle, frantic West and the sadness that seeped from the East. West Berlin was a place where shrapnel gashes and bullet holes still marked the walls in Fasanen Strasse and strolling hookers in thigh-high white boots, patrolled the Kurfürstendamm of an evening, chanting ‘biz-nez, biz-nez’ at potential clients.
When I crossed into the East, I rediscovered a new world and a recently invented human species, Homo Soveticus. Little Trabants sputtered along empty streets. Shop windows might sport a lone jar of pickles. Along Unter den Linden, the only ‘biz-nez’ on offer was a platoon of goose-stepping soldiers , wearing steel helmets shaped like soup bowls.
I would cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie for the excitement of not believing what I saw. The giant apartment blocks along Karl Marx Allee, the central boulevard that swept through East Berlin, were not only multitudinous lodgings , but advertisements for the superiority of the System. Time itself set hard as concrete in these giant blockhouses, where thousands lived.
Restoration of famous monuments from war-torn rubble reflected not culture but ideology and conceit. Here and there a grand, pre-war monument had been expensively recreated. A theatre or a concert hall preserved, with a touch of disdain, as redoubtable examples of a doomed ideology. One that the young, liberated , authentic German Democratic Republic had left triumphantly behind.
To preserve, as costly mausoleums, cherished artefacts from a bourgeois past, while turning your city into a prison filled with inmates and apologists, where no-one mentioned the War, or the Jews, or the Wall, took time and force. It required, also , a grudging, perhaps real acceptance by East Berliners that it was better so. I met some who told me how proud they were of this other Germany. As if life behind the Wall induced a kind of somnolence. The centres of the brain that controlled memory, anger, pain and grief shut down and citizens were reduced to sleepwalkers. What the Wall came down, with it came the great awakening. It showed that the rulers of the GDR were never as powerful as they thought , and that East Berliners had never really been asleep.
Back again from the East, settled in Café Adler, coffee was a consolation. The view from the Adler, if you cared to look, showed the East German border guards looking back at you , through their binoculars. Or spying on the waitresses, busy between the tables. Years later, after the Wall had gone, one of Adler staff told a British newspaper how sorry she had felt for these young soldiers. It must have been a relief to ogle
waitresses in the Adler, she said : ‘Over there was so sad.’
Christopher Hope