A trip to Berlin, before the Wall

Last Sunday night 8,000 illuminated balloons, tethered along eight miles of Berlin’s former inner-city border between East and West Germany, were released to commemorate the dismantling of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago.

The wall, built to stem a growing flood of East Berliners to the western part of the city, had stood from 1961 to 1989, when it was breached by a wave of people demanding democracy and freedom of movement.

East Germany’s communist government suddenly announced that its citizens would be allowed to travel, and tens of thousands turned up at a checkpoint where border guards let them through.

The wall stood for 28 years, but I missed it altogether. I have visited Berlin only twice the first time in 1960, a year before the wall went up, and again in 1996, seven years after it came down. I have never been back. The first visit was memorable.

I was a 20-year-old student and somehow got selected as a member of the youth section of the Anglo-German Koenigswinter Conference, which had been founded soon after the war to foster relations between Britain and Germany.

We were the guests of a group of German students in West Berlin; and while they were eager to discuss European questions, we were totally uninterested.

Apart from me, who was politically uninvolved, our group was almost equally divided between socialists and Conservatives, who loathed each other and, showed no interest in the opinions of our German hosts.

My main function, as the only pianist present, was to accompany their singsongs in the evening, when they would take turns singing Land of Hope and Glory and The Red Flag.

I found myself warming much more to the young socialists there than to the young Conservatives, the former seeming more convivial and amusing than their stuffy counterparts, and this was probably the main reason why I voted Labour after that.

And I particularly liked John Smith, the party’s future leader, with whom I stayed in touch for the rest of his life. Berlin was a grim town then: the western part was still scarred by wartime bombing, but the addition of new Stalinist tower blocks made the eastern part even grimmer.

There was no wall then, but only foreigners were allowed to visit East Berlin, from which West Berliners were excluded. So the British delegates were waved goodbye by our West Berlin hosts as we set off in a bus for the communist unknown.

We had no clear idea where we were going, but our destination in East Berlin turned out to be the home of a Lutheran pastor, who escorted us to his church hall for a meeting with his parishioners.

There we were subjected to speeches on the iniquities of the East German regime, its persecution of Christians. Complaints which seemed surprising to hear publicly aired in the Stasiinfested capital of this repressive state.

Then they sang us some hymns, and the pastor asked us to sing some English hymns. It was a misunderstanding. He was under the impression that we were a Christian delegation from Coventry, seeking reconciliation after the destruction of Coventry Cathedral in the war, but there was no way that Socialists and Conserva-tives could have been made to sing together.

My second visit to Berlin, in 1996, was to interview Daniel Harding, a renowned British conductor. Eight years later, in 2004, its mayor, Klaus Wowereit, described it as “poor but sexy”.

Now, after a further 10 years, it is not just sexy but also rich and, I read, the world’s greatest magnet for dissipated youth. It is a centre of Bohemian decadence that reminds us of the Weimar Republic. Who would have expected that the wall’s fall would lead to this?

By arrangement with the Spectator