The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  Travelling through rural Germany in May delivered an improbable further nemesis: asparagus. It was two weeks since ‘SPARGEL!’ began appearing on roadside shacks manned by some careworn farmer’s wife; by now the word was scrawled with abandon across every restaurant chalkboard, and poised to trip from every waiter’s tongue. Now, no one appreciates a frothing stream of heavily tainted urine more than I do, and it was certainly welcome to be offered a food group that wasn’t pork or potato. Except spargel was never an offer. It simply appeared unbidden on every plate, served with an almost pornographic leer and announced with wet-lipped, sibilant relish: ‘… mit spargel’. It didn’t help that the native preference is for white asparagus reared under plastic black-out tunnels, so my schnitzel was never garnished with wholesome greenery, but buried under a sheaf of flaccid corpse fingers. They even stuck it all over my breakfast, and I came to dread parting filled rolls. It was soggy and bitter and made my pee reek like a tyre fire. But at the same time it was More Food, so in it all went.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  The GDR’s defiantly spartan workhorses reunited. They churned out 3 million of each.

  The settlements grew sparser and lonelier, their elderly residents supplied by mobile butchers and bakers whose vans would pull up outside the church, honk horns and wait for business. In the old West, towns that hadn’t been worth an Allied bombardment were full of colourful medieval homes, their timbers appealingly decorated with religious homilies in elaborate Gothic script. Over the old border, the GDR trappings lingered: enamel-shaded streetlights like something out of the Gulag, smutted-porridge house render, a lost colony of Trabants in a concrete barn. And an awful lot of cobbles, which doubtless predated the Communists but must surely have appealed to them, with their spartan durability and no-pain-no-gain administration of progress. By mid-morning everything from my brain to my breakfast would be shaken into a pulpy coalescence that settled just above the buttocks.

  Two or three times a day I’d wheel past a surviving watchtower or some other big-picture souvenir, a sprawling rank of derelict checkpoints by a former motorway crossing, or the huge and hideous scar of an open-cast brown-coal mine. There was usually a big stark sign to let you know where the old border had lain, saying something like ‘Germany and Europe were divided here until 7 September 1991’ (with 1.4 million mines to clear, the authorities didn’t reconnect some areas until 1994). If there wasn’t, I’d often find a memorial to somebody who died crossing it. One of the most affecting honoured Kurt Lichtenstein, a fifty-year-old West German journalist killed in October 1961 while compiling a report on the ongoing erection of what the GDR always referred to as ‘the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’. Lichtenstein was a lifelong hard-left socialist disillusioned by the increasingly authoritarian East German regime, and well known to them as a result – there is nothing a Commie despises more than a red of a different stripe. When Lichtenstein stepped across a shallow trench near an unfinished stretch of wall he was machine-gunned by guards who had been tracking his every movement, falling dead with his head and shoulders in western territory. The next morning’s GDR press honoured the guard who fired the fatal shots with a smiling portrait and the headline, ‘Well done Peter!’

  Most border-zone villages had opted, quite forgivably, to eradicate all evidence of the hated, bloodstained wall, but I rode past occasional sections nobly preserved as A Warning From History. The first, at Hötensleben, caught me unawares: I rounded a parade of suburban homes and suddenly found myself in the death-strip, looking down a long, broad grass corridor studded with girder-pyramid tank traps and observation towers, hemmed in by mesh fences and that whitewashed concrete final frontier. I dismounted and pushed the MIFA up the concrete dog-handler path, by turns alarmed, sobered and thrilled. I wasn’t alone: how bizarre to see the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart patrolled by very different people walking very different dogs. Ignoring the loud inner voice that urged restraint and respect, I propped the MIFA against the wall proper, balanced my camera on a tank trap and trotted back to the bike.

  I had blundered across my camera’s voice-activated shutter option one lonely, long-ago night in a Finnish log cabin, and since employed it with selfie-tastic abandon. Its Korean programmers had endowed this feature with a three-word trigger vocabulary; the inexplicable ‘whisky’ had never once worked. I struck a dramatic pose, one hand on the MIFA’s saddle and my granite stare fixed on a distant watchtower, then uttered the most dependable shutter cue.

  ‘Shoot.’

  Nothing. I tried the other.

  ‘Capture.’

  A windy day such as this generally demanded a raised voice; I upped the volume and tried again.

  ‘SHOOT.’ Silence. ‘CAPTURE!’ Nope. ‘SHOOT! SHOOT! SHOOOOOOOT!’

  I can’t explain why it took me so long to grasp that these weren’t the words for a man in a GDR shirt to be yelling across a death-strip dotted with elderly dog-walkers. By the time I did, though, I had bellowed them each at least a dozen times, rising in a spittle-flecked crescendo of furious decibels. The precise moment of realisation coincided with the shutter’s overdue click. It is difficult to describe the crumpled contrition apparent in the resultant photo, because there isn’t any: I’m laughing hysterically.

  Tim Moore

  @mrtimmoore

  My voice-activated shutter responds to two words, and in the wind I had to shout them repeatedly. SHOOT and CAPTURE.

  The terrain had been limbering up for a while – a hill here, a valley there – and one afternoon it suddenly leapt to its feet and started doing star-jumps. My German editor Rainer had warned me about the Harz Mountains, and after all that Finno–Baltic flatness it was certainly novel to find myself up in the saddle through villages stacked either side of a gushing Alpine torrent, with background toots from a narrow-gauge railway. Having looked reasonably sensible for weeks my MIFA seemed once more comically unfit for purpose, but to give the bike its due it conquered the hairpins with something near assurance: as later climbs confirmed, in low gear I could now ride up a 10 per cent slope for hours, albeit with immense sloth.

  ‘SHOOT!’

  Just look at our happy faces by that 600m sign: the highest my little MIFA had been in its life, I fancied, forgetting it had recently been in an aeroplane.

  At the top, EV13’s embarrassment of rogue route-planners lured me off down a logging trail that opened into a buttercup-strewn, Julie-Andrews-ready mountain pasture. I was utterly lost and a misty twilight had begun to creep up from the lowlands of Saxony; a day that had started with sun cream was ending in goose-pimples. Yet somehow I knew that Germany wouldn’t let me down. I whistled bumpily down the tilted meadow and there, at its loneliest fundament, stood a little white bench with HOTEL GRÜNE TANNE painted on it in Gothic script. A trail of further benches strung out through a steeply pitched forest led me improbably to the eponymous establishment, and an hour later a waitress in an embroidered dirndl was coaxing pallid stalks of spargel between my helpless lips.

  What kind of Communist would I have been? Popping out of the womb in 1964 would have made me a born and bred state socialist, with twenty-five years of formative indoctrination to look forward to. It was a thought that had accompanied me for months, and crystallised as I walked through the homespun border museum in a village hall at Tettenborn, still breathless from a wild 54kmh descent that had loosened my handlebars. On the one hand I’m a bit of a coward, so active rebellion would never have been on the agenda. Neither would escape. One diorama detailed a local man’s attempt to drive his family through a heavily fortified railway frontier in a lumber truck clad in home-made armour plating: I looked at its stricken scale representation, peppered in bullet holes with a wheel sheared off, and knew that man would not have been me. But on the other hand, I’ve been insubordinate from a very young age. My earliest primary school memory is being told by a teacher to hold my tongue, and obliging with a thumb and forefinger and a horrible sarky grin. I can’t see
that sort of business going down well in the GDR’s semi-compulsory state-run junior organisations, the Young Pioneers and the Free German Youth: from the age of six upwards, two-thirds of East German children spent a couple of evenings a week grassing up neighbours for watching Western telly and pledging en masse to ‘deepen friendship with the Soviet Union and defend socialism against imperialist attack’.

  I found one possible metier in a display case full of GDR propaganda magazines, stuffed by the thousand into aluminium ‘hand rockets’ that shed their load over the West with the aim of demoralising border guards. A photo of Brian Jones from the Rolling Stones in an SS uniform above a no doubt jauntily withering caption. A beckoning comrade dolly-bird on one side of a double-page spread; a threatening Soviet mega-missile on the other. Within the constraints of the system I could have had some fun working on these, I thought: an appealingly surreal office environment, with no harm done except to the enemy litter patrols – in forty-five years, precisely one West German border guard defected. But in truth I’d never have got the job without that vital state-approved youth background. In all likelihood, I would have wound up doing something menial and harmless, making MIFAs by day and getting through the evenings with a few half-litres of sour pilsner. Nude.

  The museum was a one-stop encapsulation of the GDR’s creepy, timeless weirdness. A case full of cheap children’s toys and toilet-paper comics told a tale of impoverished stagnation; everything seemed rooted in some 1960s pound-shop dystopia. And how painful for Germans of all people to live with the unevolving shoddiness, the two-stroke Trabants and spoon-brake MIFAs. I learned here that those cylindrical-shafted golf-tee observation towers were made from stacked sewer-pipe segments, and regularly toppled over. The Stasi reports that wallpapered one room bore dates that spanned the nation’s five-decade existence, yet all seemed to have been banged out on the same forms using the same typewriter.

  ‘Trust is good, but surveillance is better.’ The Stasi’s unofficial motto kept 97,000 employees – a workforce one and a half times the size of the army – very busy for forty years. They monitored a third of all East Germans, some six million people, and in doing so accumulated files that required 125 miles of shelf space: seventeen million sheets of paper per mile, with a total weight of 6,250 tons. In a few brief decades, the Stasi filed more documented records than the whole of Germany had managed to accrue since the Middle Ages.

  Dissident groups were so densely infiltrated that by the mid-1980s every other demonstrator was a spy, creating an impression of gathering public discontent that began to concern many senior officers. Still they couldn’t stop themselves. The scale of surveillance, and its petrifying, lunatic scope, knew no bounds.

  After the Wall came down and the archives were laid bare, people learned that two-thirds of the nation’s church leaders had been informers. They found entire rooms stacked with neatly labelled jam jars, each containing a shred of fabric: the Stasi had kept a national ‘scent database’ of unreliable citizens, enabling them to send sniffer dogs into suspected meeting areas and establish who had been there. Some samples were obtained from swabs placed on chairs in Stasi interview rooms, others from socks and underwear stolen from suspects’ apartments. For good measure, while the Stasi spooks were in the flat, they would often spray the floor with a radioactive tracking substance that has since been linked to several deaths.

  But even interesting people lead fundamentally banal lives, and Stasi surveillance was all about quantity, not quality. Here is a representative sample from the minders who tracked Lutz Rathenow, a dissident writer:

  Rathenow then crossed the street and ordered a sausage at a kiosk. The following conversation occurred:

  RATHENOW: A sausage, please.

  VENDOR: With or without a roll?

  RATHENOW: With, please.

  VENDOR: And mustard?

  RATHENOW: Yes, please.

  Further exchanges did not occur.

  When peace activist Vera Lengsfeld looked through her liberated Stasi files, she discovered that a record had been kept of her preferred washing-up liquid (of the two brands available in the GDR). She discovered that a jar of her odoriferous essence had been stored on a shelf. And on the list of sixty Stasi officers who had been permanently assigned to track her every move, she discovered the father of her two sons, a poet she had been married to for thirteen years. When she confronted him, he admitted that he had been working for the Stasi since his teenage years, and had met, wooed and wed her on their orders.

  Outside the museum I tightened the handlebars beneath a huge plastic GDR emblem, and concluded that anyone reared in East Germany had earned the right to hate everyone and everything, and to take that wounded bitterness to the grave. Yet here’s the extraordinary thing: having threaded this way and that over the old border for so long, I’d established that East Germans of all ages were notably cheerier than their western counterparts. When someone shouted encouragement from a bus stop, or slipped an extra bread roll into my bakery bag with a wink, or offered me a boat ride over the Elbe, I knew which side of the old border I was on. More than once in the old East my breakfast came accompanied with a ‘Guten tag, Herr Moore,’ an unheard of personalised honour for the fly-by-night touring cyclist. If you were in a long supermarket queue, and the sweaty foreign cyclist in front of you dopily failed to notice that a cashier had just opened another till, what would you do? No offence, but unless you’re East German I can’t see you tapping him politely on the shoulder to bring it to his attention. Perhaps it was a legacy of the comrade days; perhaps an outpouring of post-Stasi bonhomie. Either way it was most welcome.

  The contrast was especially marked when I ran into an almost unbroken procession of bank holidays. In the old West they took their front doors off and repainted them on trestle tables. In the old East they pulled trolleys full of beer very loudly into the woods. Late one sunny afternoon I clattered down a barley field – thanks, EV13 – shot through a gap in the hedgerow and ran straight into a gathering of farmers and their families, busy emptying a tractor-trailer piled high with booze. I dare say more sober, more Western people might have found this encounter less amusing. An hour or so afterwards I enjoyed that stubbornly unforgettable Bon Jovi serenade, at least I think I did. To be frank my recall of these days is tinged with delirium: the shops were rarely open and for the thick end of a week I got by on petrol-station snacks. Once even the petrol stations were shut and I rode all day on two warm cans of Magic Man and a forgotten, pannier-matured salami roll. From then on I sidled shiftily along the guest-house buffets with an open rucksack and a reedy hum: ‘On the twelfth day of breakfast, the cyclist stole from me … ’

  I was a connoisseur of frontier porn by now, a hopeless borderphile. I’d ride past a farm and note that its sheep were fenced in by recycled sheets of Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart mesh. I could cast an expert eye across the land and chart out the border by colour alone: the twenty-five-year-old trees that had annexed the death-strip were a conspicuously paler green than their senior neighbours. In another twenty-five the watchtowers might have all been swallowed by trunks and leaves, but for now they stood clear. One point for a second-generation BT-9; two if it still had its searchlight. Yet even in trainspotting mode it was impossible to tune out the jarring malevolence of such structures in this landscape of plump and cheerful hills: Big Brother keeping tabs on the Teletubbies. The contrast was turned up to eleven when harmonious old witch-hat castle towers began to partner them on every other horizon.

  Sometimes – OK, once – the border threw up a cheeringly human story with a happy ending. Most escape bids, even the successful ones, were breathless dramas full of bullets and barking Alsatians. But the border-side village of Böseckendorf produced a two-part Ealing comedy: in 1961 and 1963, more than a quarter of its residents sauntered cheekily into the West completely undetected, when heavy snowfall buried the minefields and all but the top few feet of the fences. I didn’t have long to savour this jaunty tale. A coupl
e of hours later, I paused at a memorial to a GDR border guard killed in 1962 during a confused confrontation with Western counterparts. An everyday tragedy with a shocking epilogue: in 1998, the West German guard who had fired the fatal shot was found dead near his car with a bullet hole above his right eye, the precise injury suffered by his victim. Some months earlier, a former Stasi officer had unsuccessfully attempted to launch a prosecution against the guard over the 1962 incident. The murder remains unsolved.

  The blue-skied bank holidays brought a million bikes out to play, clotting the towpaths along what my EV13 route guide winningly billed as ‘The Salty Werra’. I later passed the extraordinary, sparkling hills of white potash slag that explain why this river ranks amongst the most polluted in Europe – one of them so huge it was marked on my map as Monte Kali, after the mining firm that piled it up there. You won’t be astonished to learn on which side of the old border this towering alien spoil-heap is located, but you might be to hear that it’s still growing by 900 tons an hour. For days the air was thick with a not displeasing tang of phosphates, and the Werra’s poisoned waters tumbled appealingly over weirs and wound past hillside castles. Throughout the afternoons my fellow cyclists would pull over and haul picnics from their panniers, offering cautious nods as I barrelled past. What different breeds we were, Pootling Couples versus Man on a Mission. No contest: for a week I was never once overtaken, in a race that no one else knew they were in.