islandhippy

Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down twenty years ago today? I was selling ridiculously expensive Christmas trees and glass baubles in the Christmas Decorations department (or Xmas Decs, as we called it) of Harrods in Knightsbridge, London. I was 18 years old and just beginning my gap year between school and university. I was putting in a couple of months' work at Harrods to earn the dosh to travel for nine months in India and Southeast Asia. At the time I was expecting to return from Asia to take up a place at university studying German literature. (In the end I switched from German to Indonesian literature, which was a far more sensible option considering the canon of written Indonesian literature spans about 150 years compared to over 800 years of German literature.) But back in the Xmas Decs dept of Harrods, I was still expecting to be reading Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse (and was yet to discover Mochtar Lubis and Pramoedya Ananta Toer) and was very much into German culture. I was completely amazed that the wall was being torn down and I remember seriously considering ditching the baubles and hopping on a bus (no budget flights back then) to Berlin to join in the celebrations. That I didn't (I was quite protective of my baubles and didn't want any of the Etonians in the storeroom to smash them) is a decision I still regret today (together with never seeing Queen in concert before Freddie Mercury's death ... evidently I share with Germans a poor taste in pop music too).

I did manage to visit East Berlin when it was still under Communist rule. I entered the Eastern Bloc state for just an afternoon as a teenager. The only thing I remember now was being in a bar and ordering a Coke only to be met with a blank stare. Of course they didn't have Coca-Cola! It was then that I realized what it meant to be the wrong side of the wall: no Coke ... oh, and the Stasi (the Ministry for State Security) of course.