In from the cold

It is 34 years since the Berlin Wall fell. For Dunedin author Philip Temple, going behind the Iron Curtain was like entering a time warp.

When I arrived in Berlin to take up a scholarship in early 1987, I found a city frozen in deep winter and Cold War division. The only ways through its notorious Wall were checkpoints where anything could happen.

The city seemed frozen solid. Skaters used the Spree river and canals as fumefree highways. Cars skidded as they took off from the lights. When I walked to the U-Bahn subway from my apartment each morning, I checked the temperature on the big thermometer in the apotheke's window and began a daily guessing game. I knew that it was at least minus 10 when the hairs in my nostrils began to freeze. It was my first time in Berlin, and the big freeze of January 1987 cast a magical glitter over the divided city, adding to the sense of mystery and dark drama. A friend with a flat overlooking the Tiergarten station told me that it would take Soviet tanks only 15 minutes to reach them from the Brandenburg Gate.

In this atmosphere, with images of the movie The Spy Who Came in from the Cold surfacing in my head, I took the S-Bahn (rapid rail) to Friedrichstrasse station to make my first crossing of the Berlin Wall. My New Zealand friend, Gunter Bennung, had made contact with Jutta Bach, his old school friend from Potsdam days, and encouraged me to visit her. I was able to telephone to fix a time to meet her at the station. It was the only checkpoint available for foreigners crossing on foot. We spoke carefully above the clicks and hissing that signified the listeners. I told her I was a friend of an old friend who would like to take her to dinner. And she replied, in a measured voice, that she would be very happy to host me on my first visit to, loudly, "the capital of the DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik, in East Germany]". At the station, she would be wearing a blue and yellow scarf, colours of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) so that she would be easy to recognise.