It has been six long years since the last time I shared this story of drinking beer with Vladimir Putin, and given that the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s dismantlement approaches, a “rewind” is in order. First, a mild disclaimer.
This tale from 1989 has unexpectedly taken on a life all its own, with requests for clarification pouring in from near and far, and so readers need to be aware from the outset that my beers with Putin cannot be scientifically verified. It was the pre-selfie era, and there is no photographic evidence to prove our presence together, seated at the same table in the Dresden beer hall on that particular evening.
All of which effectively begs the question: Exactly how did Mr. Putin and I come to be located in the same approximate geographical vicinity in the first place?
Well, it’s all because I spent the first three weeks of August, 1989, buffing and polishing V. I. Lenin’s shoes, and this is where the account begins.
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More specifically, the footwear in question was attached to a gargantuan statue of Lenin, prominently located at the entrance to the Volkspark Friedrichshain in East Berlin, the capital of the German Democratic Republic, henceforth to be referred to here as East Germany or the GDR. The ultimate objective of my voluntarily proffered shoeshine -- and tree planting, and landscaping -- was to make things look tidy and respectable in the Volkspark, which was cleverly reclaimed atop mounds of bombed-out rubble from World War II, and served afterward as the front yard for a hospital that often disgorged armless and legless pensioners into the summer sun for their afternoon constitutionals.
The stodgy and doctrinaire East German officialdom was in a summer deep cleaning mood of sorts that long ago August, because an important celebration was being planned for September, 1989, when the GDR would be throwing a party in honor of its 40th birthday. Among the prestigious guests expected to attend was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, progenitor of many socio-political trends that were not making the East German leadership very happy at the time.
In fact, there had already been embarrassingly public signs that ordinary East Germans were prepared to take Gorbachev’s attempted reforms seriously, and if unable to safely agitate for glasnost and perestroika within the GDR, then to do the next best thing: Vamoose. They were driving their tiny asbestos-laden Trabants to Hungary for sanctioned holidays, then disappearing across the only recently porous Hungarian border into Austria, where transit visas brought them to West Germany, sanctuary and immediate citizenship.
But none of that yet mattered at the beginning of August, at least not in terms of ultimate outcomes, and so there were branches to be pruned, trees to be planted, hedges trimmed and streets swept until they groaned with unfamiliarity. The GDR certainly tried its best to look the way its press clippings always proclaimed it did, although it generally didn’t, and perhaps somewhere in a declassified Stasi file there exists a yellowed photo of me with a shovel in one hand and a mug of raspberry infused Berliner Weisse bier in the other.
And that’s because hidden away in the center of the Volkspark was an Imbiss, a small sausage, snack and beer vending stand – usually with rows of wheelchairs parked in front – and while the recommended workers’ commissary back at the dilapidated main shop was cheaper, it served the same basic meal of sausages and soup every single day.
There wasn’t any beer there, either.
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Of course, we know today that the GDR’s birthday bash, while smashingly choreographed, didn’t entirely go over as planned. In fact, 40 proved to be as good (and old) as it ever got for Communism, Teuton-style. Behind the scenes, over champagne and cocktail weenies, Gorbachev sternly lectured the hidebound East German nabobs and all but disengaged the USSR from its surrogate’s future, setting crazy wheels into motion that culminated with a not-quite-as-old-Turk party upheaval, lapdog Erich Honecker’s sacking, the fall of the Berlin Wall (Honecker’s own pet project), and the abruptly disintegrated GDR’s unceremonious landing atop history’s scrap heap – all within an incredibly brief four-month period, 25 years ago.
That’s a hellacious hangover by almost any standard, especially for a whole country, but naturally I didn’t know any of this while enduring border pleasantries, and although hindsight affords the clarity to recognize that selected warning flags were beginning to fly, some already quite animatedly, there was no credible reason at the time to believe that substantive change was just around the corner.
Earlier that same year, Honecker had maintained the Wall would stand for 50 or perhaps 100 more years, so long as the conditions prefacing it remained unchanged. It seemed so, and we saw no reason to suspend the laggardly formation of an East German-American Friendship Society back in Louisville, and to prematurely renounce the junkets we imagined such an organization would offer us during the glorious proletarian future to come.
It turns out we were mistaken. What’s more, we weren’t the only ones.
(Part Two tomorrow)
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