Pilsner, Putin and Me (part Three).

(We pick up the story at summer camp, circa 1989)

Once the volunteer brigade was billeted at the Planterwald quasi M*A*S*H camp in East Berlin, we began an unforgettable three weeks of daily work, which wasn’t tremendously difficult, if occasionally dirty, followed invariably by nightly beer drinking, both at the camp and various other pubs.

After a few evenings, our favorite became a Keller near Alexanderplatz that served Wernesgruner, one of the few East German beers brewed to West German artisanal standards.

Granted, cheap beer was plentiful in grocery stores, which were well provisioned by the prevailing standards of the Bloc. These simple lagers were palatable at minimum levels of price, flavor and alcoholic content, but it was revealed later (after unification) that those East German brewers responsible for producing everyday beers often were forced to substitute other bitter substances in place of sometimes unavailable or too expensive hops.

Like bile from the stomachs of cattle. Yes, really.

Each weekday morning at around 6:00 a.m., I’d rise from the top bunk, usually bleary-eyed and hung over, and watch the girls in our co-ed tent get dressed. Afterwards I’d freshen myself at the shower tent, splashing some water on my face and brushing my teeth, and then adjourn to the mess tent for rolls and coffee or tea. Some days I’d buy a bottle of local “Maracuja” soft drink for refreshment. After that, it was a ten minute walk to the S-Bahn station, and then another 10 minutes aboard the train before the changing point. The second S-Bahn train deposited us somewhat near the job site, but too far to walk, so we always took a street car for the final mile.

My friend Jeff was in my group, along with an Italian, a Finn (both of them male), and a woman from Northern Ireland. There was another woman from West Germany, and then two each FDJ guys and gals. We worked alongside veteran employees of the East Berlin parks department, and I noticed early in the game that none of them seemed eager to abandon socialism for the enticements of the capitalist world. In short, they pretended to work, and their bosses pretended to pay them. To most, especially one named Wolfgang, this was an excellent arrangement.

At first, I resolved to play it straight and at least try to put in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, but from the beginning there was much to warn against the futility of such an honest approach.

At an orientation of sorts prior to being handed shovels, we’d been lectured by the volunteer brigade’s Communist party functionary (an older man with ludicrously black-dyed hair) about the importance of the labor, and the East German student assigned to translate the man’s utterances couldn’t help mocking them aloud, safe in the knowledge that the functionary couldn’t speak a word of English.

Our translator’s greatest scorn was reserved for the bureaucrat’s admonition against consuming alcohol on the job. In fact, virtually all the East German students in attendance raised their eyebrows and giggled, and for the next three weeks, my own group made daily lunchtime visits to the secluded park Imbiss for one or two half-liters of low-alcohol Berliner Weiss emit Schuss (with a shot of non-alcoholic raspberry syrup added).

Sometimes we even ate lunch.

Weekends were for exploration. Some times Jeff would accompany me, but most of the time I’d wander off alone to walk through the neighborhoods and try to get a feel for life in the capital of the GDR. Both halves of Berlin were subsidized by their respective sovereign nations to serve as showplaces of the economic systems espoused by each, and accordingly, West Berlin was hyper-Western and East Berlin just as over the top in the other direction, yet they shared the characteristics that preceded the forced division of the city.

The Wall was omnipresent, yet seldom seen during my ramblings. You felt it.

The entire city had been laid waste during WWII, and while West Berlin retained almost no discernable scars of the conflict, bullet holes could still be seen amid the crumbling brownish-gray, coal smoke stained stucco of the surviving housing stock in East Berlin.

News stands touting “news of the world” stocked only East Bloc papers and the broadsheets of Communist parties abroad.

Time itself was a variable concept. One Sunday morning I was strolling down a deserted street when I heard familiar music coming from an opened third-story window. It was Country Joe & the Fish, circa 1968: “One, two, three, what are we fighting for?”

I’d buy a greasy sausage, watch people walk through the parks, and a Trabant would belch past. All of it was grist for an earnest contemplation of the meaning of geopolitical life.

It would require thousands of words to retell all the stories, and perhaps some day there’ll be time to rewrite this narrative and tell a few more of them. However, the point today is to explain the Baylor-Putin beer-drinking symmetry, and to do so, I must now fast-forward to the end of the three-week active work segment, the harvesting of my final weekly pay packet of a crisp 100 Ostmark note bearing the visage of Karl Marx, and the delivery of the stated bonus owed the Western contingent in exchange for our labor.

From the beginning, we volunteers had been promised an extra payout at the conclusion of work. Presumably, we’d be rewarded with a week as pampered guests of the FDJ, spent touring the GDR outside East Berlin. We’d stay in cluttered university dorms, eat in minimalist university cafeterias, and meet committed socialist university students from different parts of the country.

The reality of this reward proved far less comprehensive than what had been promised. Something was up, and apparently we had become afterthoughts. Our escorts, practicing leftists from West Germany and Switzerland who were demonstrating the art and science of the junket, weren’t shy in expressing their annoyance at the absence of preparations and unexplained changes in the schedule.

In the end, and with some difficulty, we were able to transfer from East Berlin by train to Rostock on the Baltic coastline for two nights before being shifted all the way back through East Berlin southward to Dresden, close by the Czechoslovak border, where we were warehoused for five days – roughly three too many. Yes, there was the Zwinger palace and Opera House, and an excursion by Elbe steamer to the castle at Konigstein proved fascinating. But, honestly, it became boring after two days.

Among the cities we were supposed to have visited was Leipzig -- on a Monday. The visit was summarily cancelled, and when a small group tried to buy tickets to make the journey ourselves by train from Dresden, the officials at the ticket window literally shut it in our faces. Why couldn’t we go to Leipzig? We didn’t know it then, but weekly Monday evening protests had already started in Leipzig, and they were escalating. The East German authorities didn’t want us to know, and didn’t want us to go.

We were stuck inside of Dresden, with the Leipzig blues again.

(For Part 4, come back tomorrow)