Innocents Abroad: A Cold War Story

This is a little Cold War story. Just a snippet from 45 years of conflict. It’s not the usual Cold War story – no spies, no intrigue, no proxy wars. But I think that buried in this little story, there is something bigger. Not a lesson exactly, more an observation.

I have been thinking back to the first time I crossed through the Berlin Wall many years ago on my way to the East German city of Dresden, a city which, outside the UK, I have now visited more than any other and which I will be returning to next month. That first visit was at a time when the Cold War was hot, the cement was hardly dry on the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis was almost still a crisis.

The really scary part remains a vivid memory – being scrutinised by an armed guard in a wooden hut at Checkpoint Charlie, hardly daring to breath in case he uttered the dreaded words ‘Komm mit’, so fearful that my teeth hurt. I can also remember that one of the other members of the group I was with actually was taken away because he had unwisely brought with him a copy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Don’t bring any written material, we had been told. Would I ever see him again?

But I can also remember how blasé we were about this journey behind the Iron Curtain. How, in our inexperience and naivety, we laughed when the East German border guard on the train crossing from West to East asked if we were a group and, when we nodded, demanded to know who was the leader. Leader? We didn’t have a leader. We were just a very mixed bunch of young people you would now describe as being on a gap year flung together by a desire – for different reasons – to go to Dresden and help rebuild a hospital that had been partially destroyed during the bombing raid of 1945.

We were quick to learn, once we had spent a little time in the German Democratic Republic, that the words group and leader went together. It was not possible – not possible were words we also got used to hearing – to have one without the other. But we didn’t know any of this on the train. The guard repeated the question. For a minute or so, there was silence and then unexpectedly a bright spark in the corner piped up: I am. Suddenly everything was all right. The question had been answered correctly. The guard demanded no proof of this leadership status, merely handed back the passports and left the compartment. We had passed the test.

East Germany at that time was a strictly controlled society. East German citizens were not only confined behind the Berlin Wall, they also needed permission to move from one town or city to another. But what happens if some people come along, like we did, who are oblivious to the fact that they are being controlled?

That’s my observation. The fragility of control. How much does its power rest on an unacknowledged agreement between the controller and those being controlled?   

By the way – I did see him again, the young man with the banned book, and he will be in Dresden too next month for the launch of a German translation of the book Stepping Off the Map: Memories of a Cold War Adventure which I edited and compiled a few years ago.

The German edition is called Arglos im Kalten Krieg, the word arglos containing suggestions of both innocence and lack of guile – words that are a good description of how we reacted to the guard’s interrogation.