Stromness Dragon

This is by way of a little change from Caritas! But there may be a common thread….who knows?

At university in the late 80s, I visited Berlin with my boyfriend, Steve. His mother was German, and his grandmother still lived there; she had been a widow for many years.

We flew over East Germany and my ears hurt so much with the pressure that I couldn’t hear for at least 24 hours. Our hosts, Steve’s relatives, were very kind to me despite my rudimentary German and temporary deafness. I loved Berlin – it was a fabulous mixture of wide streets, confident people and modern architecture standing side-by-side with medieval ruins.

On our first evening there we went to see Steve’s grandmother, Christa. She was quite crabby and smoked like a chimney, claiming ‘it is my only vice’. We made her dinner and told her what our plans were for the week. We were going to see the museum at Checkpoint Charlie the next day, and the day after that we had booked tickets to go on a coach tour of East Berlin. The old lady’s thin hands shook and she tutted crossly at us. What did we know? She said. We were just silly tourists. She said we had no idea what it was like to live in a divided city; and she told us this story.

In 1961 Christa and her sister lived in one part of Berlin, and their parents lived in another. There were all sorts of rumours about how the city was going to be split in two, but no-one really believed it would happen, until they woke up one day and discovered that Berlin was divided into East and West. Overnight, a thick fence of barbed wire had been erected: Christa and her sister in the West, their parents in the East.

The East German authorities, not wanting to appear unsympathetic, issued the two daughters with passes, to enable them to cross the border and see their parents whenever they liked. Nonetheless, it was hard for them all, and life was especially difficult for the old people in the East. They did not have any washing facilities in the block of flats where they lived, so every weekend, Christa would drive through the military checkpoint, go to her parents’ flat, and collect their laundry. The next day, or the day after, she would bring it back, cleaned, dried and ironed.

One weekend she crossed the border as usual. She changed the sheets on her mother’s and father’s bed. She took their bath towels and the used sheets and went home. The evening was dry and warm with a brisk breeze, and the laundry dried quickly. The next morning Christa folded everything neatly and placed them on the passenger seat of her car, before setting off for the border. At the checkpoint, instead of being waved through as she usually was, she was pulled over; it was guard she did not recognise. He demanded to know why she had a pile of sheets and towels in the car. Was she going to sell them? No, she protested, they belonged to her parents. Did she not trust the state to take care of her parents? Was she criticising the government? His questions became increasingly aggressive but Christa stood her ground. After a quarter of an hour of protesting, Christa was forced to hand over her pass, and her own papers were stamped with clear instructions that she was never allowed into East Germany from that day onward.

She never saw her parents again. Her sister took the clean laundry the next day and crossed the border without incident – indeed she continued to travel betwee West and East unhindered for many years. When her parents died, Christa was forbidden to go to their funerals. The cruelty was heartbreaking, she told us, but what sickened her most was the arbitrariness of it. Her theory was that the border guard had a hangover, or had an argument with his wife that morning, and needed to take out his bad mood on somebody. So, she concluded, she could understand why we wanted to see the East, but she could not be happy about it. Steve and I did not know what to say, so we topped up her sherry glass.

We did go on the bus trip round East Berlin and it was astonishing in so many ways. My feelings at the Checkpoint Charlie museum were a mixture of horror, pity, and amazement at human ingenuity. We returned to Scotland to resume our studies, and we spilt as a couple a few months later. It was quite amicable, but our paths didn’t cross much after that.

In autumn 1989 extraordinary things were happening in the world – through political will and popular action, the Eastern Bloc started to crumble and one by one Europe’s former Communist countries emerged into capitalism. There was an atmosphere of great hope and expectation, culminating in the moving scenes at the Berlin Wall, when thousands of people used hammers and drills and their bare hands to tear down that most hated symbol of a divided country.

I sat in my flat and watched my tiny black and white TV, remembering the story of Christa. As my heart filled, there was a ring on the doorbell. Standing on the doorstep was Steve, and he was carrying a bottle of wine.

‘I thought you’d like to celebrate,’ he said. ‘It’s too late for her, but it’s not too late for millions of other people’.

We toasted Christa and her parents, and watched the world change.

Tags: Berlin, Berlin wall, East Germany

Trackback URI | Comments RSS