Berlin Ecke

Be Helden Every Day

Alas, Memory Lane

Ikea's bottled "Swedish Festive Easter Soft Drink"

It wasn't stunningly foul, but tasted oddly familiar. It tastes like the stuff branded as Pepsi that they sold in East Germany.

It's kind of a mild malt flavor. The reason the DDR-licensed Pepsi tasted this way, was because the eastern licence-users refused to pay Pepsi to import the syrup, and wanted the formula. Naturally, the licencees of products such as this didn't see the past behaviour of the COMECON crowd as terribly honest in these matters, and refused.

Nonetheless, even in the worker's paradise, a corporate logo's appeal was even understood by the Nannies-in-Chief of the people.

In Case You’re Wondering...

...what Ost-Berlin Mitte looked like in the 80’s, it looked like Ost-Berlin Mitte in the 50’s. That is, if you just scratched the surface and got away from the Potemkin village near the Fernsehturm.

Leipzig, 1971

Street Images

Despite its Name and Signature tune

It was called "Freheitsender 904" or Freedom Station 904, and actually broadcast on 908 AM/MW out of the East German transmission site at Berg, which also happened to be where "Soldatensender" for NVA soldiers was transmitted from, as well as a Station broadcasting to Soviet troops, and the DDR's only longwave radio tower.

It's a peek into a very strange world, thankfully lost to time. I know, I know... it isn't a number station, but it was a very strange form of propaganda, especially given that it would only broadcast for 30 minutes at a time.



"Enjoy." If you can, that is. If you don't recognize the present use of the tune, then check here.

East Berlin, 1969

Fragmentary images.

Origins: Stoking Anti-Globalization

Founded on the theory that those Mexicans didn't need jobs anyway, a typical "editorial" from the golden age of self-delusion.



A Radio Berlin International broadcast from 1972

A Cold War Radio Fragment

Radio Berlin International (DDR) - circa 1981

Jammin' 'til the Break of Dawn

One can easily forget how it was not that long ago that transmitting honest news was a hard thing to do, and that people in oppressive states had to rely on word of mouth to find out what was going on in the world. One always had to suspect that there was falsehood in it as well.

Mapping the Wall

Home movies made by Peter Guba from 1959-62 when he was an East German border soldier can be seen online at the website of the Deutsche Historiches Museum. Oneonly wonders how he got away with it.

„Barbara”

Christian Petzold’s film „Barbara” takes an unsentimental look at the DDR from the perspective of a Doctor who sought an exit visa.



Be warned, though. The place never looked that good.

The Forbidden East

Well, not really. The west was what was forbidden to the easterners. The East was forbidding.

“In 1979/80 my family took part in the biggest espionage scandal that the former country of East-Germany saw in its entire 50 years of existence”

- Thomas Wagner, “If It Had Not Been for 15 Minutes”

Mr. Wagner’s story is a tense and fascinating one, and paints an honest, well rounded, and compelling portrait of the DDR that’s rarely found in the English language. Having livbed there myself (as a lucky foreigner who could leave,) I can attest to that.

File Under: No Longer Deliciously Grim

The DDR built Berlin's Funkturm tower to get million Euro make-over.

But the TV tower, a favourite with tourists for its East German kitsch and revolving restaurant at the top, will remain open while the work is carried out

It may no longer be deliciously grim, but should remain DDR-kitchy and wierd.

“The last big renovation was 15 years ago. But the expectations of the guests have increased. We will now create a smarter atmosphere and provide more comfort,”

Red Reed

Cheaply called “the Red Elvis”, American singer/actor Dean Reed pursued his beliefs in Marxism by moving to East Germany in 1973. Say what you will about him, he was sincere, but I could never quite understand how he managed to square away his passion for individualistic themes in his music, gazing a sympathetic eye to the lone, hard working cowboy, with the concept of collectivism, and thus on acute social dependency.

Personally, I think any fealty offered to Marxist-Leninism is misguided, requiring one to accept too many lies as a part of its’ stated virtues. Then again, I remember it first hand.



Here he is in an appearance in the DDR with a vieux copain, Phil Everly, who made what was in 1979, a historic visit. It was a sort of casually and quietly organized form of Ping Pong diplomacy, later to be tried by Bruce Springsteen in 1988.



While his voice was tender, and his craft good, in truth Reed was more of a curiosity to the world outside of the Warsaw Pact/Comecon/Soviet sphere than anything else. Within it, he grew to be a little like the Pepsi they sold in the eastern bloc: it was similarly packaged to the stuff they wanted, but slightly different in a way – only permitted to offer just so much, and no more.

Where's Waldo ? ! ?

No discussion of the nature of Socialism is complete without a rubber chicken.

From the Wonderful World of Persuasion, DDR Style

Permit me to present an excerpt from a 1981 East German publication for agitators. It was meant to give small-time propagandists who were supposed to work the barracks, the factory floor, and the like, examples of successful preaching to the imprisoned.

One choise piece provides an example of the limits of truthiness:

Italy: What are the Causes of Terrorist Actions?

The new year began in Italy as the old one had ended: with terrorist actions. On 31 December, Police General Enrico Calvaligi was shot at the front door of his home. In January, the kidnapping of Judge Giovanni D’Urso occupied public attention until he was a released. These were only the latest in a long chain of events that began on 12 December 1969 with a bomb at the Agricultural Bank in Milan and reached its high point so far on Bologna on 2 August 1980 when 85 people were killed and more than 200 injured. What are the causes of these terrorist actions, which have affected Italy in particular, but also other capitalist countries?

Bourgeois and social reformist ideologists and politicians generally, reject the claim that the roots are in the capitalist system. Explaining the causes, however, requires considering the whole interrelated complex of objective and subjective of economic, social, political, and ideological factors, and they develop from the nature of the capitalist system!

In the socio-economic area, terrorism is bred complex of factors of new and old contradictions, in the backwardness of the south, and particularly the sharpness of the economic crisis and its results. The inflation rate in 1980 was above 20 percent throughout the year, at the top of the leading capitalist states, and unemployment according to official figures remained at about 1.7 million, about 50 percent of whom are young people. In a situation of general uncertainty, extremist and anarchist ideas spread among dissatisfied and politically immature young people who want revenge on the bourgeois state. In this milieu, adventurers find an audience for their calls for “direct action” and terrorist acts, which they claim are the quickest path to social change. The crisis is also hard on the middle class, and produces not only anti-monopolistic views, but also radical views to the right and the “left.” Demagogic appeals to national sentiments, or to economic and social difficulties and social problems, allow neo-fascist and “leftist” extremist groups to win supporters in various social levels — from the poorest farmers in the south to some tradesmen, businessmen, civil servants, and students.

The two were, of course, kidnapped by the Red Brigade, well known for their “right wing views” to the East German listener of this bromide, and who were trained, plosletyzed to, and funded by the intelligence agencies of the Warsaw pact,making the entire thing a “Daddy drinks because you cry” type of argument.

Recipes from the Near Distant Ago: „Restesoljanka” or Soljanka from Leftovers

A RECIPE FOR 4 SERVINGS

INGREDIENTS:
Leftovers that can still make a stock (meat, sausages, vegetables)
leftovers from vegetable salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, lettuce, radishes, onions, cheese ...)
Margerine, for frying
Pickled cucumbers, peppers (or ragout - subject to availability)
Ketchup
bay leaf
allspice
lemon slice
sour cream
Salt & pepper


PREPARATION:
Chop all the meat and meat leftovers into small cubes, add salt and pepper
Sear them in a pan.
Add the diced vegetables, cucumbers, peppers.
Add the leftover sauce, vegetable salad, cucumber and / or pepper
Cover to the top with water.
Season with bay leaf, allspice, ketchup, salt & pepper.
Let it come to a boil

Recipes from the Near Distant Ago: Meat Soljanka, Russian Style

A RECIPE FOR 4 SERVINGS

INGREDIENTS:
800 g beef
150 g veal
1 carrot
1 parsley root
2 onions
1 bay leaf
150 g chicken, finely diced
100 g ham, cut into small pieces
2 sausages (such as frankfurters), cut into thin slices
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour
2 pickles
10 salted, real saffron milk caps, chopped (can be substituted with mushrooms),
12 olives, black
1 tablespoon capers
1 cup sour cream
Salt & pepper


PREPARATION:
Make a broth of beef, veal, carrot, onion, parsley, and 1 bay leaf. Add pepper.
Remove some meat from the pan and use it for another course.
Add to this broth the chicken, ham, and sausages.
Chop the onion finely and fry in butter and flour. Thin with broth and add to the pot
Add the pickles, mushrooms, olives, and capers. Let it come to a boil, and then let simmer on low heat for 10-15 minutes.
2 minutes before end of cooking, thicken with sour cream.

Variation: The poultry can also be sauteed in butter and then added to the Soljanka

September 11th (1989)

While Le Monde has for several years made smug references to “the real tragedy of September 11th”, which they always imply to be the anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende, they overlook mourning over another tragic event in their beloved world view: 11-September-1989. Ouai, quelle misère!



What the present day hard left are sentimental about: a grim autocracy
that they never lived under, and don’t understand.

The Hungarian government decided that they would open their border to Austria, taking down their barbed wire section of the Iron Curtain . It permitted east block citizens to simply “walk off the rez” to freedom and away from Marxist-Leninism. Never mind the Marxist-Leninist sympathies they were stepping straight into, and how the failure of Communism would undercut their control fantasies about man, or delusions that in Socialism there is freedom. Morons.
Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city's opinion-makers were often blase or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners' longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism.

- ”Berlin”, David Clay Large

And if the ideology of the present day “peace camp”, “Solidarity” movements from unrelated people afar, and their sympathists who pretend to be on the sign of human decency and freedom doesn’t sound familiar, this kind of thing might make them feel warm and right at home in the paradise of ”the workers’ and peasants’ state”

East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the "reeducation" process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as "SS-Gestapo" and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: "You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive.... We'll finish the job."

Obviously they travelled through time, since all of it must have been inspired by Gitmo. After all, mankind knew no cruelty before 2002.