Pilsner, Putin and Me (Part Two).

(In which the absent senior editor continues the saga)

My miniscule part in the GDR’s final summer came about because of a stubborn determination to be different from the rest of the backpacking tourists and spend as much time as possible in the Soviet Bloc during my months-long European sojourn in 1989. I’d become fascinated with the countries behind the Iron Curtain, and ideology was no consideration for me.

In fact, I never felt safer than when I was wandering through a police state.

For budget travelers like me, the GDR was one of the tougher Communist nuts to crack. With the sole exception of turncoat Yugoslavia, a passport alone was not sufficient to gain entry to the countries comprising the Bloc. Official permission in the form of a visa, either obtained stateside prior to departure or approved at an embassy somewhere in Europe, was also required.

However, merely possessing a valid passport and official visa still did not constitute final approval. Upon arrival, the traveler customarily was required to register with the governmental authorities, and the most common way of doing so was to report to the state bank and engage in the ritual of the mandatory currency exchange.

A specified number of dollars per day of one’s approved duration of stay was swapped for useless local currency, which was even more worthless – literally not worth the paper it was printed on – if carried out of the country afterwards, and which could not be exchanged back into dollars before leaving unless the minimum required exchange had been exceeded. That’s assuming someone could be located to perform the exchange function while a train was parked at the border being inspected by angular uniformed soldiers with machine guns.

In effect, the entire territory of Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Bulgaria was tantamount to the company store, and you had to use company scrip to buy most items. For the most part, eating and drinking proved fabulously cheap, as were hostels and home stays in “private” rooms available in slightly more liberal Bloc locales like Hungary (I use the “L” word with due caution).

As you might expect, the notoriously hard-line GDR was little interested in budget travelers, backpackers, hippies and other forms of decadent Western life, even if it desired the hard currency we carried in our money belts. Prepayment of expensive hotel rooms was the norm in East Germany. The question for me was this: How to spend time in the GDR without breaking the bank?

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The answer came from Vermont.

Volunteers for Peace was, and remains, an organization dedicated to the principle of international volunteer exchanges between all willing nations, and generally speaking, among people of all ages. During the Cold War, VFP provided numerous opportunities to evade the restrictive entry requirements outlined above in return for a modest registration fee and two or three weeks of volunteer work toward a specified project, which might be assisting at an archeological site, or helping rebuild a house for use as a daycare center, or agricultural work.

Problem solved. A $100 registration fee was mailed to VFP, the requisite visa paperwork completed, and penciled into the itinerary following June in Czechoslovakia with my friend Jiri’s family, and three July weeks in Moscow to study Russian (though mostly to roam the streets in search of excitement), was a few recuperative days of decadent R & R in West Berlin, and a day to meet the West German sponsors and decamp across the fortified border into the Communist sector for a month in the GDR.

Encumbered with booty gleaned from the USSR, which proved to be a pain getting through the East German border control and eventually cost far more to mail home than it had to collect through swapping cigarettes and t-shirts, my train rolled into Zoo Station, West Berlin in the company of several Americans who’s been in the language program with me. We met Professor Barry, my cousin, and embarked upon a five-day alcoholic binge, with my friends gradually peeling off for their own adventures elsewhere until only Don and I remained for a final evening at Dickie Wirtin’s for goulash and lager.

The next day, still in West Berlin, I followed instructions to a cold-water flat where several of the Western volunteers had been asked to meet, including my Louisville friend Jeff. We prepared a communal meal, drank a few bottled beers that I’d packed, and chatted about the month to come. The evening was spent curled up on the wooden floor, with occasional interruptions as our hostess tended to her baby. Bread, jam and tea was for breakfast, and then we rode the subway back to Zoo Station, and over the Wall to Friedrichstrasse station, itself located in East Berlin, but also serving as a West Berlin public transportation stop and the control point to East Germany.

Later that afternoon, joined by others who’d come from different directions, we had our first glimpse of the place that would serve as home for the coming three weeks. Some distance from the epicenter of East Berlin, in a wooded park by a lake, and only a short distance from Treptower, location of the grandiose Soviet WWII memorial, was a fenced compound not unlike the M*A*S*H encampment on television, constructed entirely from surplus East Germany military tents and equipment. It had showers, latrines, a commissary, a stage and a shop. We were divided eight to a tent, in which there were bunk beds, blankets and little else.

Roughly two thirds of the campers were East German college student members of the Frei Deutsche Jugend – FDJ – in effect, the Communist youth organization, and the pathway to career advancement. Each summer, the FDJ “volunteered” to do socially useful work for the Fatherland. I was among roughly one hundred Westerners permitted to do the same, and naturally, we were deemed useful for propaganda purposes, although I must say that the impending exhaustion of the GDR’s ideals probably should have been evident from the absence of intensive instruction.

Had I considered it, there was another clue as to the disintegrating state of the East Bloc. Whereas the FDJ’s annual Planterwald international volunteer brigade was supposed to include representation from the entire Soviet-controlled expanse, there were conspicuous absences in the summer of 1989. The Poles, infected with the contagion of Solidarity, had not been invited. Neither were the Hungarians, who unbeknownst to us had opened their border with Austria earlier that same summer – enabling the Trabants to stream through.

Granted, there was a sprinkling of Bulgarians, Czechs and Romanians, and quite a few Cubans, the latter being among the most sought after on the part of the East German girls.

Me? I was happy to have a bunk and a beer.

(Come back for Part Three next Saturday)