In Europe

That's how I ended up there.’
    Her husband: ‘Almost all of us have a story like that.’
    The woman beside me starts talking about the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘I'll never forget it. 13 August, 1961. I was eighteen. I was standing there in Oranienburger Strasse when workers began rolling out the barbed wire and throwing up a wall. Meanwhile, the most amazing things were happening. It's been described so many times, but I saw it with my own eyes: how two friends were standing on the east side, they said goodbye, one of them took a running jump over the wall into the West, the other one started a life in the East. A
Wessi
and an
Ossi
, and no doubt it was years before they saw each other again.’
    She herself had felt absolutely no urge to jump over the low wall; there was no way she would have left her mother behind. ‘Everyone around me had been thinking about it for a long time, most of them had already decided what they would do even before they started buildingthe wall. My older brother chose to go to the West, he was seventeen, and he left as soon as he'd finished his final exams. My closest girlfriend went too, suddenly she was gone, without a word. That was terrible. Now she lives in Nancy, she married a Frenchman.’ She herself met a Pole, and these days she lives in Warsaw.
    Everyone at the table starts talking at the same time. ‘Yes, that's exactly the way it was at first, in the East: as far as you knew, you were making a decision for the rest of your life, for ever.’
    ‘There was hardly a German family that didn't have brothers or sisters, grandfathers and grandmothers, nieces and nephews on the other side.’
    ‘You weren't even allowed to cross the border for your parent's funeral.’
    ‘It was only in the 1970s that
Wessis
were first allowed to travel to the East, every now and then. Finally you saw the brothers, uncles, nieces and nephews who you'd been talking about and writing to so much.’
    ‘And then it turned out that you really didn't have anything to say to each other.’
    Berlin, 9 November, 1999. In the dilapidated head offices of the former national bank of the DDR, just off Unter den Linden, the tenth anniversary of the fall of the wall is being commemorated by an unusual concert: the favourite music of both former chancellor Helmut Kohl and former DDR leader Erich Honecker. We listen to the Hennigdorf brass ensemble (‘My Way’), the Berliner Schalmeienexpress (stalwart DDR marches) and the Generation Berlin Orchestra with a special piece composed for the opening of a lignite mine. Between the pieces of music, someone reads out texts written by Kohl and letters from Honecker. The arches of the great hall of the old bank have been patched with bare brick, there are huge holes where the proletarian art once hung, the rain rattles on the roof and drips through the ceiling. The audience, mostly young people and artists, listens intently.
    A record player starts up with the song ‘Ein Augenblick der Ewigkeit’, a hit from the old DDR radio programme
Stunde der Melodie
. The evening's host reads a letter, written to Honecker when he was in prison. ‘Dear Mr Honecker, thank you very much for the lovely music we were able to listen to for thirty years, thanks to you.’ Outside, the great celebration is being skilfully stage-managed by the new Germany: the BrandenburgGate glistens in a firmament of television camera lamps, there are three police cars on every corner, and through it all the Berliners walk in the rain, drinking beer and being mostly silent.
    Later, for no real reason, I stroll over to the playground close to Hotel Adlon. There is no one there. I sit down on a bench. Pop music is blasting in the distance, to the left are the bright lights of the new Potsdamer Platz, to the right the fireworks. Beneath the grass and the climbing frame lies the bunker, forgotten now. Four mentally handicapped people are taking the S-Bahn home, accompanied by their supervisor. They cheer at every illuminated glass palace they pass, sing along with every electronic peep, admire the new glass dome of the Reichstag as though it were a firework display. They are the only ones who view the new Berlin with unadulterated pleasure, ten years after the collapse of the wall.
    The next morning Alexanderplatz reeks of old-fashioned DDR coal. The smoke is coming from the chimney of a wooden caravan. On the door is a sign: ‘SIND IM WESTEN’. In front of it are racks of cards on which all