The Bigger Picture

After the Wall

by Bob Moses

Recent celebrations in Berlin commemorated the 20th anniversary of 11/9/89, the night that joyful crowds first breached the hated Wall between East and West Berlin, and the iconic highpoint of a year that saw democracy movements spread through Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. Like many other writers, photographers, filmmakers and just plain revelers, I was drawn to what suddenly seemed the center of the world. I was a music writer, not a foreign correspondent, but The Boston Phoenix (thanks to Jon Garelick and Ted Drozdowski) was willing to print what I reported back. I also had a friend and previous collaborator in Berlin, filmmaker Frank Stehling, who was equally determined to discover developments in his city and region, particularly in the former DDR, which was as unfamiliar to him as it was to me. It quickly became clear that the night of November 9 was prologue not climax, the kick-off party for the thorny and miraculous period that followed.
Prague, Jan. 1990
I arrived in Berlin just after New Year's, 1990. Pedestrian traffic was recently allowed through the Brandenburg Gate, but U.S. citizens entered through Checkpoint Charlie. Discussions continued that would set free elections in the DDR for March, 2010. Frank and I watched East German television, fascinated by live broadcasts of debates from university halls in Leipzig and Dresden, where students and workers, not government officials or multinational Round Tables, groped their way to whatever was going to come next. What came immediately next were Stasi files fluttering to the street. Vaclav Havel had just become president of Czechoslovakia and began forming a government. Romania was still roiled by nearly 1,000 deaths in December's popular uprising; protests against the transition government in Bucharest continued through January 1990, matched by sympathetic protests Frank and I witnessed in Prague.

We set out first to simply walk around in East Berlin, to feel the difference between the vibrant Kreuzberg neighborhoods we frequented and the Soviet pallor on the other side of the wall. We bought a DDR map, and I poked through racks of releases from the Soviet Melodiya label. We took our map back to Frank's apartment, and plotted a trip to the countryside. We suspected that the jubilation at the Wall and the ferment in Leipzig and Dresden didn't translate to the countryside. We fixed on a small, lakeside town as our destination, figuring it might be a resort area, sufficiently distant from urban areas. Frontiers were the first hints of the confusion that reigned in the absence of authority. We tried, and failed, as I recall, to get visas for Czechoslovakia in West Berlin. We entered East Berlin through separate gates. I went through Checkpoint Charlie and Frank through the only gate that allowed autos and West Berliners, each with a 24-hour stamp in our papers, which we proceeded to ignore.
The Wall
The small town in the center of the DDR did indeed feature a lake. It also featured a Soviet tank garrison. The streets were ominously empty, and we were shunned in the cafes, the locals getting up and moving tables as we cautiously sat down. After a column of tanks accompanied by infantry in fur hats thundered by, we sought the relative security of Dresden's ferment. We met some journalist friends of Frank's, got the rundown on events in Dresden, and asked about Czechoslovakia and Prague. No one was certain what our reception would be at the border, so we decided to find out. We said good-bye to our pals, and scattered the back seat with borrowed copies of the GDR newsmagazine Der Stern, and my English-language books, which would have been contraband a couple of weeks previous, and might still be.

From the April 6, 1990 Boston Phoenix:
"January 27. While driving toward Prague on a highway in East Germany that Hitler built to convey Panzers into the Sudetenland, we passed under a bridge where two kids lofted a sign painted on a sheet: "Welcome, our brothers. We [heart] (a drawing of the West German flag)." We were driving through remote countryside. Traffic was sparse, and night approached. It was apparently worth braving the winter evening's chill for the sheer exuberant release of waving the West German flag deep in what was once Soviet-held territory."

We found the confusion at the frontier we anticipated. Arriving at the Czech border at night, we surrendered our passports through a slot in the checkpoint's guardhouse, as bright lights blasted up in our faces. A U.S. citizen and West Berliner traveling via the DDR clearly merited a closer inspection and we got one. We were ordered out of the car, and the backseat library was duly noted. Away went officer One into the guardhouse, and out came officer Two. Much pointing and discussion. Away went officer Two, and out came a short, round woman bearing larger shoulder boards than either One or Two. Sizing up the situation in a glance, she shrugged and clearly indicated that we were to beat it, and now. The previous rules apparently no longer applied and who knew when a new government, never mind new customs and immigration rules, would be coming. On we went to Prague.

I kept to my editorial station in life, and started tracking the local music scene. I was keenly aware of the role music had played in the Czech Velvet Revolution, and that rock and roll riots in East Berlin in 1987 and '88 fed discontent with government repression. I wanted to find vestiges of the Plastic People of the Universe, the legendary ensemble who, after the Soviet invasion in 1968, created an adventurous, jazz-inflected rock that echoed the Velvet Underground and especially Frank Zappa. They earned arrests, interrogations and imprisonment for their efforts, and existed mostly underground from 1974. They also earned a passionate following among Prague's intelligentsia including future president Havel, who, in addition to sheltering the band and letting them record at his farm, helped write the Charter 77 manifesto partly in response to the arrests of some of the People and their fans. In 1988, some of the People (bassist-singer Milan Hlavsa, keyboardist Josef Janicek and guitarist-violist Jiri Kabes) formed Pulnoc, which toured the U.S. on tourist visas in 1989, and recorded and released City of Hysteria in the U.S. in 1991. When Lou Reed came to Prague, he and Havel went to a club where Pulnoc honored their guests with covers of Velvets songs, and were joined onstage by an emotional Reed.
With Gary Hart in Prague, 1990
While I missed Pulnoc and the People didn't reappear until Havel asked them to reunite in 1997 to honor the 20th anniversary of Charter 77, we did arrive in Prague the same week as two emissaries from the U.S. Frank Zappa flew to Prague at Havel's request with ideas for tourism and cultural exchange, plans for a documentary, and an offer of financial help. Senator Gary Hart made a less-heralded visit as part of a trade delegation, perhaps the harbinger of a wave of young entrepreneurs who would soon make Prague the capital of economic and romantic adventurers. In the central city, at the beginning of Prague's second spring, the Kino Sevastopol was playing Wall Street.

(Frank Stehling is now Managing Director of Primehouse, which creates programs to train European film producers and put together cross-border projects and financing.)

The Plastic People receiving an award from Havel, with performance clips:

The Plastic People of the Universe: "Apokalyptickej pták"

Půlnoc: "Muchomůrky bílé"

Wall images via Flickr, Raptor2996

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