And now I live in Berlin. Memories from my first time in Sweden stir from forgotten depths. Sunlit autumnal Lund. A gentle introduction to the rigours of the north but where I soon felt disoriented. This time it’s different; a liberation from the here of Sweden and the there of Britain, the dogged half century of struggle to preserve my Englishness, release from the continual longing to be elsewhere, from the sharp break in 73, from the before and after. It helps that southerly Berlin shares the ivy clad softness of Britain. But it’s also different because I have had much to do with Germany over the years and my German is stronger than my initial equipment of very few Swedish words.
The beginning was tawdry and pointless. Excited by my first trip abroad at university, I wanted more and made for Dover, and after successfully getting away from clustered hitchhikers at Ostend, was rolling across flat Flanders towards Aachen and Cologne. Late in the day, I arrived at Wuppertal with its then exotic overhead train (tram). Stuck in a cold city, I spent the small hours in a heated street toilet before returning home in the morning, I wasn’t an efficient traveller in my youth.
A couple more hitchhiking trips at university, racing down the motorway system beyond Cologne and Frankfurt headed for Prague and later Yugoslavia. Broken fragmentary memories of standing on motorway access roads, of the cleaner’s agitated raus in response to my tardy sleeping habits, trying to talk about the GDR with a judge in need of more light-hearted evening distraction from a difficult case.
And later in search of a place to spend the night, unrolling my sleeping bag in what I thought was a quiet spot in Cologne, I was almost immediately offered five marks for my services. I politely declined without feeling threatened – but was my market price really so excruciatingly low? My fellow traveller and I retreated to more peaceful waiting at the nearby station for the first train to anywhere.
My first trip to Berlin was later, post-university, A fast motorcycle and me, helmet less on the pillion. In my memory, I had a suitcase but it must have been a rucksack. Heavy and hard to keep my balance as we speeded east, Dropped on the Kudamm in the early hours. Working for a left youth paper, I somehow managed to organise an interview with a friendly man who eventually tired of my unstructured rambling although we parted as friends. And then the night at a commune, called I believe Commune One out west somewhere. A disturbed night as the police came looking for some minor on the run from family life, who was believed to be there. Waking in the morning, confused by the first morning sight of a girl naked to the waist who was leaning over me, in practice not as laid back as I would have liked to think I was. Not sure whether there was any erotic charge but whatever attraction the sleeping adolescent may have had was rapidly dissipated by my struggle to regain consciousness and she disappeared. And later rattling away on the S-bahn near Westkreuz talking with a commune dweller and on my way to my first trip to the GDR. The start of a long fascination, how the solid familiarity of capitalism could disappear after a ten-minute train ride. No preparation, no plan but fascinated by the bookshops where what was marginal in the west was mainstream. And the different use of space when land was not priced in the western way.
After moving to Sweden, I made many trips to the GDR. In those days, travelling overland, you could buy a cheap railway ticket to anywhere in Germany. I travelled back from the UK via Berlin, went across (probably on the wrong type of visa) to Ostbahnhof and by train to Sassnitz and Sweden.
The wall interested me and I spent hours walking as close as I could come on the east side and then traversed the same route on the west side. But again fragmentary memories, helping push start a stalled Trabi, the glories of the Ishtar gate, the border guard who ran after me to give me back what I had left on the shelf at the currency exchange and visa booth. And on a later visit, standing carelessly beside a cage at the eastern zoo, when the cat rose up with a roar and I was probably lucky not to be uncomfortably close to hisher paw.
And the contrast between New Year’s Eve in East and West where in the east all was booked for groups and we were very fortunate to obtain uncollected tickets to the Brecht theatre, dressed in my Swedish winter gear, unseemly ravishing sausages on small sticks as the Bonze brushed past, while in the West individual pizza was freely available if you didn’t mind having fireworks thrown everywhere.
Then there was my PhD, purportedly on the housing situation in the GDR, though my interest was more general and I was less than lukewarm about my topic. Not happy about the course of events in 1989, I was at least happy to part with my embryo thesis in a paper recycling container when my research object disappeared.
My interest in Germany and the GDR in particular had become much more serious by then, although my inability to conceive of the suddenness of the collapse was not a sign of mastery of the subject.
But I did learn a lot, both about the workings of a deformed workers state and about the workings of my own brain (weakness of structure, inability to see the trees for the leaves, indicating that writing a doctoral dissertation was not my strongest suit).
I found it difficult to visit what had been the GDR immediately after its collapse. But in later years, as the physical differences fade and the memory of what once was becomes more and more subtle, I have forgotten and travel there as elsewhere, especially in the last decade.
A ragbag of assorted memories but a ragbag which means that Germany is not so foreign for me.
I am excited about learning about German mythology, how it relates to the Nordic, and its place in early German society. And learning more German, although my pride in being self-taught may get in the way, I want to know more about the mix of languages in the lands that became Germany, including the relationship between Celtic and German. But, of course, also about modern German politics.
Very soon now most of my books will arrive in Berlin and we will approach the tipping point, where a good proportion of the objects that customarily accompany me on my voyage through the world are here. I am looking forward to getting to grips with a major European culture. I like my extra Swedish storey from which I can see a different world but this is so much grander.