PART 2 - Continued from Part 1

My inexpensive hotel, or rather pension, was in a section called Wilmersdorf, near the lower end of the main westside boulevard, Kurfürstendamm. I usually ate breakfast there with an Israeli engineer named Aron—I never knew his last name, and didn't ask—who was in Berlin on some government business he was rather vague about. I told him what Harry had said about Ostmarks and Westmarks, and that I couldn't understand why, crossing being so easy, there wasn't a flood of Germans 'escaping' from East to West Berlin.

"But there is!" Aron said, "About 200,000 last year, and at least half that many so far this year. Mostly Berliners, because it's harder to get into East Berlin from the east as it is to cross over once they get there. But there are still a few East Germans, and even some Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, who are able to slip through."

"What happens to them? Where do they go?"

"Well, most of them are stuck here—they don't have money to get any further, and even if they do, they don't have visas. Still, a few manage to get out. And those who can't get out won't go hungry; West Berlin is loaded with 'refugee' money."

That was true; refugee money and every other kind. The stores were full of consumer goods, and cafés, bars and restaurants were crowded around the clock. Dozens of night clubs advertised entertainment rivaling Broadway or Las Vegas. It seemed as if Western countries, especially the USA, were using West Berlin as a show window in which people of the Communist countries could see the advantages of Capitalism. That took money, and there was obviously lots of it being poured in.

Harry was right about my near-useless Ostmarks, but I noted that apparently-equivalent goods and services cost about the same in marks, East or West, on both sides of the city. 25 marks would buy a pair of shoes, never mind that the East German pair had cardboard insoles. A cup of coffee or a tram ride, 50 pfennigs. A pack of cigarettes, an exorbitant two marks. Just for curiosity I went over to East Berlin almost every day; prosperous West Berlin was beginning to bore me.

One beautiful day in mid-July, as I sat nursing a cup of coffee at a sidewalk café, I saw a lad at the next table who'd just eaten lunch pay for it with what appeared to be Ostmarks, and as he paid he waved an American passport under the waiter's nose. I stopped him as he rose to leave.

"How come you can pay for a meal with Ostmarks?"

He looked at me suspiciously. "Who are you?"

"Only an American tourist. But I can't spend Ostmarks here, and I just wondered how you get away with it."

We talked a little more, and he eased up. He was a student, attending famed Humboldt University and living in East Berlin. He showed me a Resident's visa stamped in his passport, which he presented whenever making restricted purchases. You know, he said, nobody ever reads that visa; they may sometimes glance at it to see if it carries an official DDR stamp, but if I show it before being asked, every clerk and waiter accepts my Ostmarks without question.

Interesting information. I filed it away carefully. When I stepped out on to the street next morning, the sun was shining bright and warm. I took my jacket back to the room, and departed for East Berlin via U-Bahn clad in shirt and shorts.

Berlin spreads out over a wide area, and weather can vary in different parts of the city. When I emerged from the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station in East Berlin, over five miles from where I'd boarded, it was raining heavily. There was a clothing store near the station, so I puddle-jumped across the street to it, went in and picked up one of those transparent plastic ponchos from a table just inside the door.

But when I went to pay for it, with Ost and then Westmarks, I couldn't show an Ausweis, and without a word the stone-faced saleswoman took it out of my hand, put it back on the table, and walked away. Still dripping wet, I left the store.

Don't get mad, get even. Took me awhile, getting advice and asking scores of questions at a dozen government offices, to figure out how.

First, at an official DDR bank, I legally exchanged 100 West for 100 East, and got a Zettel as evidence that I had done so. Then I spent 93 marks of it to buy a train ticket from East Berlin to Paris. The fare would have been the same if I'd bought the ticket and boarded the train in West Berlin, the sequence being East Berlin Hauptbahnhof, West Berlin Hauptbahnhof, and no more stops till it crossed into West Germany, from where it continued on to Paris. Then I went to the Ministry of External Affairs and got a "Through-travel" visa stamped in my passport, an impressive tax-stamped validation taking up a whole page, which permitted two trips across the German Democratic Republic. I left for Paris, stayed two weeks (but that's another story!), and flew back to Berlin. The date was August 4th, 1961.

Okay, lessee if it works. Over to East Berlin, bought the verdammt rain poncho, a pair of slippers, a comb, a couple of other minor items I didn't need, had dinner... I paid for everything with Ostmarks, which had cost me seven US cents apiece. Just as the student did, I flashed the visa page of my passport, and every salesclerk and waiter took the bills without question.

I had to buy more Ostmarks, and I bought them from Harry. I'd developed a sort of provisional friendship with him, even told him the first joke I'd ever tried to translate into German. He went over it with me several times, correcting me until I had the grammar and pronunciation letter-perfect. The English version:

Man goes scuba-diving for the first time, and is so fascinated that he takes it up as a full-time hobby. Buys a wetsuit, airtanks, helmet, snorkel, flippers, lead belt, even a slate with a piece of waterproof chalk, so he can converse underwater with other divers.
   Underwater, admiring the coral, shells, tropical fish, sees another diver, outfitted with only a pair of swim trunks. A little pissed off, writes on the slate: "I spent 1000 marks for my outfit, you're diving with nothing! How come?
   Other guy snatches the slate and chalk out of his hand, and writes: "I'm not a diver, stupid—I'm drowning!"

I still get a lot of mileage out of that one.

I kept my room in West Berlin, but for the next week my days and evenings were spent in East Berlin, visiting museums and the reading rooms of Humboldt University, talking to students, touring those research projects that weren't off limits, and going to plays and movies. I ate lunches and dinners, and ate well, in East Berlin. Harry said, "Seems like you figured out how to spend those Ostmarks."

"I sure did," I said. I didn't explain.

"You ever think how it looks to people from the other side?"

"Whaddya mean?"

"Well, lots of those people don't want to leave—they were born and raised in some neighborhood, say Lichtenberg or Pankow, and that's home to them, no matter how miserable. But a clever guy who wants to make life a little less miserable can do it easy."

"How?"

"I'll give you a simple example. He buys ten eggs for a Mark, and he carries them over to West Berlin, where he sells them for a Mark. But this Mark he can exchange for three-and-a-half of the other kind. So he goes back to East Berlin, buys thirty-five eggs, and keeps it up till he maybe doubles his weekly income."

My mind reeled. I thought, that's just one man with ten eggs. But imagine hundreds, maybe thousands, of East Berliners with crates of eggs, with produce, hand tools, books, yard goods, antiques, car trunks full of nuts and bolts, anything saleable in the West that they could buy or steal from the stumbling DDR economy. Almost all of those things were of course available in West Berlin, but these could be sold for less, and were easy to dispose of. The western world's financial support of West Berlin's economy was in effect bleeding East Berlin's economy dry. The population drain was serious, but this was even more so. And in my small way I was contributing to the downslide. With no qualms, I confess. I still had a wallet full of Ostmarks; I decided to get rid of them and leave Berlin.

There were dozens of beer-bars and even Nachtlokale, cabarets, in East Berlin, for in this as in other respects East was trying to emulate the free-wheeling West. I remembered a "Cabaret Marigold" I'd passed a couple of times on my East Berlin walking tours; music, laughter and applause could be heard pouring forth from within. I introduced Harry to Aron, and invited the two of them for a Friday evening of fun at the Marigold (I searched for it years later, in vain).

It was a memorable last evening. We all had steak dinners, drank four bottles of wine and ate bowls of Cerises Cognac for dessert, danced with lots of girls to the music of a Hungarian Gypsy orchestra, bought drinks for all the girls we danced with, applauded a magician and a juggling act, and at about three in the morning I called for the check. "Die Rechnung, bitte!"

It came to a little more than 120 Marks. I flashed the visa in my passport, the visa with the pretty DDR tax stamps, tipped the waiter and the Hungarians over-generously, and we staggered out to look for a taxi; the East Berlin U-Bahn had stopped running at midnight. The hostile Volkspolizist at the Brandenburg Gate wouldn't let the taxi through—we had to walk across and find a Westside taxi.

The Marigold bill alone, not counting tips and taxis, had come to 120 Marks, or about $8.55. See—a dollar bought four Westmarks, which bought 14 Ostmarks, and 14 gozinta 120... $8.57! Or about a microscopic two pounds fifteen shillings, for back then sterling was even almightier than the dollar. There have been other unforgettable nights since, but none that inexpensive. I left a note on the Portier's desk to call me at ten, arose, showered, shaved, packed, and took the noon train to Nuremberg, arriving there at eight that evening.

No more than six or seven hours later, in the early dark of the morning of Sunday, August 13th, East German and Russian soldiers started rolling out barbed wire barriers between East and West Berlin, replacing the wire shortly afterward with the masonry wall which stood there for almost three decades.

Every now and then I smile briefly and may even chuckle, for no reason apparent to those around me. It's because I keep visualizing this scene, a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Disdaining a gavel, Premier Nikita Khrushchev takes off his shoe, as was his habit, and pounds on the lectern with it to command attention. The delegates fall silent, and Comrade Khrushchev roars: "The Berlin situation has become intolerable! I heard about that American at the Cabaret Marigold last night, spending his black-market Eastmarks as if they were play money! That's the last straw! It has to stop! BUILD A WALL!"

I wonder if that's the way it was. I wonder, but I'll never know for sure.

© 2003 David Koblick

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