So, he had been a camp guard, but at a different concentration camp. And I was sitting opposite him in the half darkness, drinking beer.
It has long been a puzzle to me that I have never resolved. You take a newborn baby, twelve inches of helpless, chubby innocence. You take a toddler, three years old, a bundle of affection. You take a choirboy, ten and possessed of a pure treble voice, a curly blond angel, singing the Te Deum at morning service or helping Dad around the farm. Or you take a fifteen-year-old studying to be an accountant or architect one day.
How on earth do you turn that child in a few years into a savage, cruel monster capable of flogging a tethered man to death or throwing a living child into an incinerator or herding families into a gas chamber? What kind of satanic metamorphosis can achieve that?
But it has happened, not just in Germany, but right across the world, generation after generation. Every torture chamber in every dictatorship in the world is staffed by animals like that. And they were all once gurgling infants.
The lights came on. The landlord came over to snuff out the candle. No need to waste wax. I pushed enough East marks across the table to cover the cost of one beer—mine—and rose to go. The man across the table held out his hand. I left it dangling in midair. I had reached the door when his parting shot reached me.
“Killing is easy, Engländer, too damned easy.”
Years later, I would discover how right he was.
A VERY UNWISE CHOICE
My departure from East Berlin was not foreseen, but advisable. There were very few places worth visiting after dark. I could stay in, but the television was dire, even though I could pick up West Berlin.
This was strictly forbidden for East Berliners, and locally sold sets had all been tampered with to make reception of the West Berlin programs unobtainable. But thousands had a well-paid freelance “friend” come in to restore the facility. It was wise not to be caught watching the forbidden menu, but in my case they did not even bother.
Or I could read, which I did a lot. Almost my entire literary education, such as it is, comes from that year. Or I could help Reuters’s terrible blocked-currency problem by consuming caviar at the Haus Moskau restaurant. Or there was the opera.
One of the few civilized things about the East German government that was not an affectation was their love of music, theater, and opera. The Brecht Theatre was justly famous, but Master Bertolt Brecht was pretty left-wing and I had had enough of that from nine to five. But the State Opera was famous enough to attract international singers and conductors, and the Politburo spent enough foreign currency to indulge it lavishly. Of course, there was the occasional slipup.
One occurred during the opera Nabucco, which was immensely popular and always in demand. In it is the Slaves Chorus, where the prisoners sing (in German), “Teure Heimat, wann seh’ ich dich wieder.” (Beloved homeland, when shall I see you again?) Every time it was played, the entire audience rose and sang along. The Politburo members who attended were gratified by the enthusiasm but bewildered that they never did this for any other aria. Then someone pointed out that for them the “beloved homeland” was not East Germany, but the West. It was their only way of expressing a political opinion. After that, the authorities discontinued Nabucco.
And the opera had the pretty chic Opera Café, for after-performance drinking. That was where I met Sigrid, known as Sigi. She was a stunner, and alone. I checked for an escort. There was none. Move-in time.
An East German had to be extremely careful even taking a drink with a Westerner, but Sigi was old enough and sophisticated enough to know what she was doing, and even learning I was from the West but living in East Berlin did not deter her. After a drink, we shared dinner and ended up at my place. She revealed a remarkable figure matched by a rapacity for lovemaking. But on my second date, I realized there was something odd about her.
She claimed she was married to a corporal in the East German army, who would not have had the income to permit her clothes and lifestyle. Moreover, he was permanently based in the garrison at Cottbus, far away on the Czech frontier, and never got any leave. Finally, she refused to let me drive her home, but after hours of fun in bed, insisted that I order a cab from the late-night rank at the Frankfurter Strasse station.
One day I saw the same cabdriver at the statio
n, and for a hefty tip in West marks extracted from him the address to which he had taken her. It was in Pankow, the very blue-chip suburb where the elite of East Germany had their residences. Further discreet inquiries with some of my contacts in West Berlin revealed whose address it was.
I recall driving back into East Berlin through “Charlie” that night with the words of a popular song running through my head. The opening line was: “The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day.”* I had been sleeping with the mistress of the East German defense minister, General Karl-Heinz Hoffmann.
General Hoffmann was not renowned for his sense of humor. I had just turned twenty-six in October 1964 and hoped for a few more birthdays yet to come. Outside of a prison cell, if possible.
I told Reuters I was stressed out and wished to leave rather sharply. Head Office was very understanding; few could take more than a year in that place, and I had just passed twelve months. Within a week, just before the general returned from Warsaw Pact maneuvers in Poland, I had handed over job, office, secretary, and car and was at West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport boarding the British Airways direct flight to London Heathrow.
As the airliner lifted off and both Berlins dropped away beneath the wings, I looked down at the divided city, convinced I would never return to East Germany. As it turned out, I was wrong about that.
A MISTAKE WITH AUNTIE
Reuters simply sent me back to Paris to rejoin Harold King, and it was in a silent Paris café in the early spring of 1965 that I watched on a TV screen the state funeral of Winston Churchill.
There must have been a hundred or more around me, all Parisians and not world-famous for their admiration of things British, but they sat in awed silence as the bronze coffin of the old Bulldog was taken to its final resting place in a country churchyard.
I had already made my decision that the future of foreign-sourced news journalism was in radio and television, and that meant the BBC. I got a transfer back to London in April, applied for a job with the BBC, attended the necessary interviews, was accepted, and joined as a staff reporter on the domestic news side that October. As it turned out, that was probably a mistake.
I learned quite quickly that the BBC is not primarily a creator of entertainment, or a reporter and disseminator of hard news like Reuters. Those come second. Primarily the BBC is a vast bureaucracy with the three disadvantages of a bureaucracy. These are a slothlike inertia, an obsession with rank over merit, and a matching obsession with conformism.
Being vast and multitasked, the BBC was divided into more than a score of major divisions, of which only one was the News and Current Affairs Division, which I had joined. That in turn was divided into radio and TV, then Home and Foreign. All starters began in Home Radio, which was to say Broadcasting House on Portland Place, London.
But there was more. It was also and remains at the very core of the Establishment. The calling of a true news and current affairs organization is to hold the Establishment of any country to account, but never to join it.
Then it got worse. The upper echelons of the bureaucracy preferred a devoted servility to the polity of the ruling government, provided it was Labor, and it was.