Cold War still hot in Berlin
Thewall is gone, but nostalgia for Communism lingers in clubs, cafes and museums
Mathias Petersdorf wasn’t one of the first people who poured through an opening in the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, but on that fateful night he’d heard the news that East Berliners were freely crossing over.
“I didn’t believe it,” he said. “Then around midnight I walked over to Born halmer Strasse, the point where I’d heard people were first walking to the West. There was a crowd. And a few moments later I was crossing into West Berlin.”
For Petersdorf (and millions of his countrymen), who gives bicycle tours of the wall for Berlin on Bike, this was a new start. Because he’d illegally forgone military service, he was not allowed to study at the university. Now he would be able to.
“I didn’t want to get stationed at the wall and have to shoot my own people for trying to escape,” he told me as we stood at the spot where he crossed, now called Platz des 9 November 1989 (Nov. 9, 1989, Square).
Twenty-five years after Petersdorf walked into the West, East Berlin has been relegated to history books, movies (like the
excellent German-made “The Lives of Others”) and History Channel documentaries. The border between East and West has, with the exception of a few visible reminders, vanished. But come to Berlin in 2014 and the Cold War is still alive and well. At least if you know where to look. Museums, walking tours and even restaurants dedicated to the former East have all popped up in recent years — and not just for tourists; for locals, too.
And so, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall, I recently spent a week under the cool gray skies of the former East Berlin, hoping to party like it was 1989, taking in as much “Ostalgie” — nostalgia for the Ost, or East — as I could find.
Signs of those times
Friedrichshain, a neighborhood in the former East now crammed with hipsters and bars and hipster bars, seemed like a good place to start. I walked past the Eastside Gallery, one of the few stretches of wall that still exist (in this case a half-mile of it clad in all manner of street art), to one of my two hotels in the neighborhood. Sitting on the Spree River where the wall once ran, the design hotel Nhow was a splurge; the rest of the time, I stayed just down the road at Ostel, an East German-themed property. (The clocks behind the front desk, for example, were set to the time in Moscow, Beijing, Havana and Berlin.)
After checking in, I strolled down Karl-Marx-Allee, a wide boulevard built after World War II to show off the splendor of a socialist society. Flanked by grandiose Stalinist architecture, the boulevard still has a few signs of its socialist salad days: Across the street from the relic Café Moskau (at the corner of Schillinger Street) is one of the few advertisements you’d have found in a communist country, in this case, for Tatra, a Czech automobile company.
As the story goes, East Berlin authorities felt the city was being literally outshone by its Western brethren’s glam and glitz. So, like not-so-good Communists, city authorities erected an advertisement in the form of a large Tatra logo above an apartment building. It still sits there today, unlit and mostly unloved.
I strolled through Alexander Platz, once the center of East Berlin, crowned by the large death-star-like TV tower. The sun smacked against the sphere at the top, creating a shiny cross on its middle surface. During the Cold War, anticommunists referred to this sun-made cross as “the pope’s revenge,” and pro-communists answered back, saying it was a “plus for socialism.” Dotting the square were guys with sausage grills strapped to their bodies and stands (still) selling Soviet relics, like Russian military hats and wristwatches with CCCP etched across them.
Time-travel Trabant
Across from the statue of the bulbous, almost ordinary-looking Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the creators of communism, was my destination: the DDR Museum. Named for the Deutche Demokratische Republik (the German Democratic Republic or GDR, in English), better known as East Germany, the DDR Museum takes a hands-on approach to history, showing what life was like during the country’s 41-year existence. With its GDR themed restaurant next door serving all manner of Teutonic sausage as well as dishes like pig knuckle, the museum was swarming with Germans and non-Germans alike.
Living standards have changed so drastically, curious Germans approached the fake 1970s living room setup as if it were from another planet. Teenagers puzzled over the boxy television set, 20-year-olds were bewildered by the telephone with cords attached to it, and adults looked fondly at those spherical vinyl discs known as record albums.
In another room, there was a Trabant, the Communist-era East German-made cars that had a body made from plastic. Since the early 1990s, many Central and Eastern Europeans have had a nostalgic affection for them. I sat in the driver’s seat as the windshield in front of me displayed a video-game-like driving course through a Sovietera landscape. It was as if I were on a joyride through East Berlin in the 1980s.
As I cruised past gray concrete apartment blocks and downtrodden workers, a middle-aged man from Cameroon jumped into the passenger seat. “Where are we going?” he asked, smiling at me.
“It looks like we’re in East Berlin,” I said. “If that’s the case, I don’t think we’re going to get very far.”
I added, “But fortunately East Berlin is just a dreamland now.”
“More like a nightmare-land,” he said.
He might have been right. And to continue the nightmare, I next went to the Alltag in der DDR Museum (Every Day in the GDR), which takes a more earnest approach to the period, doing a good job at conveying the quotidian life in a totalitarian society — from how a rise in global coffee prices in the 1970s caused a crisis in East Germany to details of the Stasi, the East German secret police, which employed over 90,000 people to spy on ordinary citizens.
I was captivated by the letters written by children in the GDR in 1985 about what they thought life would be like in 2010. A headset translated the letters into English. Many of the young students thought life would be better but that they’d still be living under a Communist regime.
The children could have never imagined what this neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, would end up being like. Not long after the wall fell, hipsters and artists started moving to this erstwhile East Berlin neighborhood. Over time, they coupled and bred, and today the neighborhood is jokingly known as Pregnant Hill, thanks to the ubiquity of stroller pushing moms and dads. Only 20 percent of the original pre-1989 inhabitants still live there.
Taste of the past
After listening to the letters from the schoolchildren, I wandered into a fake pub set up in the museum. There were actual bar tabs from 1988 on pieces of paper. It made me thirsty, so I left the museum and walked north to the neighborhood Weissensee. There’s no reason to come to this leafy, residential part of town. Unless, of course, you want to know what it was like eating in the GDR. For the last 14 years, the neighborhood has been home to Osseria, a play on an Italian word for restaurant,
osteria, and the German word Ossi, someone who comes from the East.
This was no museum, though. At least technically not.
I was greeted just inside the door by a mannequin wearing an old East German army outfit. Then I was greeted by Andrea Ansmann, co-owner of the restaurant. She recommended I start with a bowl of the soljanka, a Russian tomato soup that had a heavy dollop of sour cream in it, and then the schweinebrotten, a pork roast that had, curiously, a thin layer of cheese stretched over it. I would have asked for a side of Lipitor for my soon-tobe-hardening arteries, but, knowing the restaurant is trying to be as authentic as possible, I knew it wouldn’t be available.
As I stabbed at my pork roast, Derk Ansmann — chef, co-owner and Andrea’s ex-husband — wandered over to my table.
“We opened up the restaurant because we thought it would be fun. We didn’t have any of this stuff,” he said, fanning his arm at the East German relics pinned to the wall, like old currency and ancient record albums that picture singers with bad haircuts. “The neighbors — 90 percent of the people who eat here are regulars — donated all of this stuff. They wanted to get rid of it.”
There is no cuisine of the GDR, of course. It’s more like food from 1960s or 1970s Germany, in the way that if you wanted to evoke 1970s culinary culture in America you might serve fondue. Fortunately, the food at Osseria wasn’t bad. I don’t think I’d become a regular, but it was edible, and it was fun to eat among the socialist relics of a time long gone.
Nostalgic for the East
Despite going to museums, shops, restaurants and monuments dedicated to the GDR, I still didn’t have a sense of what it was really like. That’s likely impossible until someone invents a time machine. I stopped by the home of Salomea Genin. Genin, 82 years old, has written two memoirs (both in German and English) about her life in Australia and Berlin. Born here, she fled Nazi Germany with her family for Australia in 1939. She eventually wound up living in East Berlin from the 1960s until the fall of the wall.
“The museums tend to simplify what was going on in East Germany,” Genin told me in her apartment in the Mitte neighborhood. “A bigger issue is that there are a lot of people now who are ostalgisch — nostalgic for the East. They only remember the prices were stable and they had a bungalow in the countryside. But they forget that they never had freedom of speech.”
My new friend Mattias Petersdorf is not one of those people. After we left the place where he walked from East to West Berlin 25 years ago, we zigzagged our way through Prenzlauer Berg, taking a shortcut through Mauer Park, a former “death strip” (the area that existed between East and West, between the two walls). Suddenly, standing at a fork in the road, he put his hand up for me to stop. He swung his backpack around and began digging through it, pulling out a black-andwhite photograph of an intersection.
“Check this out,” he said, holding up the photo in front of us. It was the exact spot we were standing in, and in the photo the Berlin Wall was right in front of us. Just over it was East Berlin. The apartment buildings looked much nicer now, most having been newly restored.
I pointed to a new glass-clad luxury condo across the street.
“You never would have seen that 25 or more years ago,” I said.
“People here don’t really like those luxury buildings,” Matthias said, “but compared to a quarter of a century ago, we’ll take it.”