The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold Read online

  The MIFA’s stunted gawkiness remained an enduring burden. I would shuffle into a guest-house reception and meet a good-hearted welcome from a proprietor curious to know what had brought a foreign cyclist to his or her door; then they’d come out to show me where to put the bike for the night, and helplessly glaze over the minute they saw it. I’d carry on talking but their nods and hums were automatic, as if the MIFA had told them all they needed to know: this guy’s story isn’t worth hearing. Until one afternoon, when someone very gratifyingly decided it was.

  ‘I think u are cycling thru Coburg. We are in Sangerhausen, that’s not too far. Would be a pleasure to welcome u here!! I am Peter by the way.’

  As one of 493 million diehard me fanatics around the world, Peter had been following my progress on Twitter. The first message he delivered through this medium was pleasing enough as it stood, but those that followed ramped my excitement up to critical levels. The ‘we’ in question was the Mitteldeutsche Fahrradwerke, referred to henceforth by Peter as ‘the MIFA’. Incredibly, they were still making bikes at the same factory that churned out my 900 all those years before; delightfully, they wished me to bring it along for a tour. So on a silent, small-town Sunday, beneath a hot, blue sky gently streaked with cirrus, there we were alone at Pressig station, waiting for the first of three trains that would take me and my plucky little bike to meet its maker.

  Sangerhausen lay deep in the old East – much further from my route than Peter had cheerfully implied – and the ponderous journey there exposed me for the first time to the hard-core, full-strength GDR, away from those borderlands diluted by proximity to the old West. The stations we clanked through were arrestingly grubby and decrepit, and the passengers who got on at them incrementally more impoverished: I saw my first pairs of scuffed German trainers, and an unshaven man with holes in his tracksuit knees. Outside the window a parade of dead factories and warehouses slid past, their lower reaches smothered in half-arsed aerosol doodling. It was the most at home I’d felt since setting off.

  Sangerhausen announced itself with pyramids of mining slag and an invasive sense of heavy-industrial decline; I wheeled the bike into a cavernous ticket hall dominated by a faintly psychedelic Communist mosaic of multicoloured coal miners, tractor drivers and – yay! – road-race cyclists working together, self-evidently in vain, for a better future. A young man with a happy face and a fag in his fist waved from the doorway, and thus was I introduced to the very splendid Peter Meyer, MIFA’s PR and social-media manager. We shook hands, wedged my MIFA into the boot of his car and set off for the hotel I was most kindly being put up at, in order to refresh myself for whatever was expected of me at the following day’s factory tour.

  On the way, driving past rows and rows of Khrushchyovka tenements, Peter gave me a rundown of Sangerhausen’s post-unification travails: after the mainstay coal mines closed down, most young people had moved west in search of jobs and better pay. In twenty-five years the population had fallen by almost half, to 25,000. The one chink of light, rather wonderfully, was ‘the MIFA’ – with 800 workers, the bike plant was now the largest employer in town. To my immense satisfaction, as he dropped me off in the hotel car park Peter confirmed that the factory retained the address that had leapt out at me during my scattergun pre-departure Googling: 33, Juri-Gagarin-strasse. With a toot he was off; I patted my 900 on the saddle and we exchanged a silent vow not to show each other up in the morning.

  ‘That’s OK, that’s OK.’

  This was Peter’s favourite English phrase, and twelve hours later he gave it an extended airing as we launched our tour in undignified fashion, bundling my MIFA over its birthplace’s 8-foot perimeter fence after failing to wedge it through the staff-entrance turnstile. My bike’s grubby dishevelment was OK, my cheeky request for a complimentary factory-workshop service was OK, and my light blue GDR jersey was OK.

  ‘Yes, that colour was national sport colour of DDR, but today we don’t care.’ Peter shrugged blithely, then pulled a very large camera from his holdall and asked me and the bike to pose before the disappointingly bland white concrete sheds that housed ‘the MIFA’. ‘That’s history, that’s OK.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear you say so,’ I said, and ripped off a curling strip of gaffer tape to lay bare the notorious emblem, looking around in vain for a plinth mounted with the three millionth 900, or a colossal hero worker holding a 20-inch wheel aloft in his tarnished fist.

  When I looked back at Peter I saw him frozen with his face to the viewfinder.

  ‘You have maybe a jacket?’ he asked at length.

  My jersey had suddenly become much less OK. As I pulled a fleece from my rucksack Peter mumbled something about creating a correct impression for his social-media publicity, and evidently harboured more immediate concerns: when we walked towards the reception area a while later, he motioned at me rather animatedly to zip the fleece tight up to my neck.

  My bike was whisked away by a man in a boiler suit, and as we wandered into the factory Peter filled me in on MIFA’s improbable survival. Following the most recent of many flirtations with bankruptcy, the firm had been rescued by an old-school industrialist who had, I gathered, made a fortune from fan belts. His turnaround formula was in evidence all around us: electric bikes, high-end off-roaders and other niche machines, dangling by their front wheels from a production conveyor lined with diligent unisex technicians. In common with almost every other European bicycle producer, MIFA is an assembler rather than a manufacturer: it doesn’t make any bike bits at all, but rather bolts together Far Eastern components. The shiny floors and muted hums and tinkles associated with this process imparted an almost surgical vibe, distantly removed from the oil-stained cacophony that would have reigned in the slapdash, mass-production age of the MIFA 900.

  We repaired to a down-lit executive meeting room, and over coffee I reminded Peter how very keen I was to interview a veteran employee – a living link with my bike. The night before, at my prompting, Peter had told me that quite a few MIFA staff from the old GDR days still worked at the plant, but he appeared to have regretted saying so ever since. ‘That’s OK,’ he now told me, with a face that said otherwise; a while later he returned with a man of about my age, who wore a smile, a suit and a pair of frameless glasses.

  ‘This is our sales manager Dieter, he is working here for thirty years.’

  Like most Germans, Dieter seemed painstakingly normal, a vorsprung durch technocrat. There was, however, a very weird tinge to our ensuing chat, and not simply because it was conducted through the medium of Peter, the sole bilinguist amongst us.

  Q: ‘So when you started at MIFA, what was your job?’

  A: ‘Since year of unity, 1990, he is the sales manager.’

  Q: ‘Yes, but before that, before 1990?’

  A: ‘That’s OK, Dieter is now my boss. You will write about Grace e-bikes and Steppenwolf MTBs? These are my brands at the MIFA.’

  And so it went on. I’d ask how things had changed since he started working here, and listen to the masterfully evasive Dieter-Peter tell me at length about the recent global resurgence of local bike shops and their influence on retail strategy. A query on the MIFA 900 series spawned an address on the domestic electric-bike market. As Dieter-Peter held smoothly forth on something else I hadn’t asked about, I glazed over and began picturing the MIFA sales office in the years of centralised monopoly: a lot of graphs with ‘SO WHAT?’ and ‘WHO CARES?’ scrawled up each axis, and a wall-chart headed ‘THE COMPETITION’ showing one stick-man pushing another around in a wheelbarrow. When I refocused the room was silent; I cleared my throat and gave it one last shot.

  ‘Dieter, I really want to know what it was like here at, um, at the MIFA before 1990. In the Communist era. In the DDR. Please tell me.’

  Peter shifted a little in his leather-backed swivel chair before translating my query.

  ‘Tarvashure!’

  Dieter’s blurted response unleashed such a burst of hilarity – even the mult
iply-pierced social-media assistant who had just joined us slapped at the artfully distressed denim sheathing his thighs – that I automatically joined in.

  ‘It’s funny, yes?’ said Peter, when he had regained his composure. ‘Because … Gustav Schur, we call him Täve, Täve Schur, he was big DDR legend of bicycle racing – you know him, of course?’

  I laughed again, alone this time, then stopped quite suddenly and said: ‘No. No I don’t.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Peter, a little awkwardly. Then Dieter rose to his feet, shook my hand and left. The elephant in the room must have followed him out, because Peter at once relaxed.

  ‘So, now you come outside – I think your bike is ready and we have some surprises!’

  I confess that I had been rather ashamed of my MIFA when I brought it back in through – or rather back over – the factory gates. What would its creators have to say about its abused filth, and most particularly about all those authenticity-sapping adulterations? I imagined a stern-faced old hand staring in disgusted betrayal at the bolt-on crossbar and that Fichtel & Sachs hub, running a forensic gaze over the replacement pedals and mongrel bar grips before crossing his arms and giving me a look that said: If I wasn’t German, I’d spit on the floor now.

  The boiler-suited whistler who now reappeared pushing my bike was not this man. Via Peter, I learned of the running repairs his team had most generously effected: the ill-disciplined headset knob had been very forcefully tightened, and the self-loosening coaster-brake bracket fashioned by Pub Quiz Peter from my ancient parts bin was no more, replaced by a proper chrome thing that would give me no further trouble (rather soppily, I miss the old one to this day). The tyres pinged when I flicked them and they’d given everything a good clean.

  My danke-schön festival was cut short by Peter, who excitedly gestured at the trio now approaching us through the MIFA car park. One carried a camera, one a notebook and the last – a splendidly upright old gent in a tweedy brown suit and gleaming brogues who immediately put me in mind of Paddy Ashdown – was pushing a small black bicycle. The first two had been sent by a regional newspaper to compile a pictorial interview that survives online under the deathless Google-translated headline, BRITISH CYCLING IN MIFA SADDLE THE BOSPORUS. (‘Always on my little tyre,’ the Englishman says with a grin. ‘This is simply the best.’) The third was Heinrich von Nathusius, septuagenarian MIFA CEO and fanbelt magnate.

  Hands were shaken and I fielded the reporter’s gentle questions. When the photographer got to work, the proud figure of Paddy von Fanbelt strode magnificently into shot and together we posed with our small bicycles, exchanging mutually incomprehensible pleasantries, which, as I note from the photographs Peter later forwarded, appear to have entertained me to the verge of lunacy.

  ‘So our boss has an idea,’ he said now. ‘He will give you this new MIFA folding bicycle to continue with your journey. That’s OK!’

  I looked around at a sea of Christmas grins, and down at the bike Paddy was proffering expectantly. It had an embarrassment of gears, an alloy frame and a general air of purposeful, pocket-sized competence that was borne out by a test ride around the car park. How dizzying to be reacquainted with the ability to build speed so smoothly and shed it on a sixpence. But also how pointlessly frustrating.

  ‘That’s so, so kind of you,’ I said to Paddy via Peter as I climbed off the saddle. ‘What a lovely bicycle. But … my journey is about history, about the days of my old MIFA 900, so I must … you know … ’

  I gestured helplessly at the chunky little state socialist propped up on its stand between us, before faces furrowed in confusion. Paddy von Fanbelt seemed particularly puzzled; I fear he believed that I was only riding this pitiful old relic because I couldn’t afford anything better. For a moment I wondered if my gift-spurning ingratitude might earn me a firm, round slap, captured by the photographer and splashed across the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung under a righteous headline: THANKS FOR NOTHING, TOMMY THE COMMIE! Instead, Paddy ruminatively rubbed his ruddy chin, then spoke at length to Peter.

  ‘Our boss is a real enthusiast for bicycles and for history,’ I was soon informed. ‘He builds a new museum in Magdeburg for old bicycles, and would be very happy to have your MIFA there after you finish your ride. We will deliver to your house this new little MIFA and take the old one for our museum. That’s OK?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Actually, I did. A bike, what I rode, in a museum? Life doesn’t get much more OK than that. I grasped Paddy von Fanbelt by his mighty oaken hand and croaked out a stream of humbled unworthiness, which Peter didn’t need to translate. There were more photographs and handshakes, then Paddy looked at his watch and with a brisk farewell nod headed off across the sunlit tarmac.

  An hour later, as my train clanked back past the benighted stations and warehouses, I struggled to make sense of an extraordinary day. The Dieter-Peter Conundrum had taught me that for many in the old GDR – perhaps most at ‘the MIFA’, one of its few institutional survivors – today was still Too Soon. Dieter came of age in a land of spies and lies, reared to toe the line and keep schtum: when I read up on his old road-race hero, I found that Täve Schur still denies that the GDR doped its athletes, despite ample hard evidence of the most systematic and damaging performance-enhancing substance programme in sporting history (one former GDR skiing champion has estimated that for every gold medallist, 350 athletes were left as invalids). Peter was a young man but he was old enough to remember, indeed old enough to have been a Young Pioneer.

  On one level, the salutary tale of that Western border guard assassinated in 1998 by retired Stasi hitmen had shown me that the GDR’s darkest powers exerted a reach beyond the nation’s grave. On another, all that stuff about smell-jar archives and records of washing-up liquid preference was just so shamefully absurd. When Anna Funder, an Australian-born journalist working in Berlin, talked to older colleagues while researching her excellent book Stasiland, fear tied fewer tongues than humiliation. ‘The whole Stasi thing,’ said one. ‘It’s just kind of … embarrassing.’ Funder became accustomed to her interviewees adopting a very particular facial expression while reliving their GDR pasts: ‘not knowing whether to laugh or throw up’.

  And bearing all that in mind, I probably shouldn’t have been as saddened as I was that beyond their insurmountable reluctance to discuss the old days, not one MIFA employee had expressed even the tiniest curiosity in my bike. Not a single prod or query, not even a second glance: an ugly duckling rejected by its own mother. I had confidently imagined that my 900’s back-to-its-roots pilgrimage would have meant as much to its creators as it did to me, picturing veteran employees massed around it with rueful smiles, inspecting their humble handiwork with a blend of pride and embarrassment and sharing bitter-sweet reminiscences of Five Year Plans and boozy lunch-breaks. Instead, they had all gazed right through what was evidently an uncomfortable reminder of an unhappy past. Right until the very last minute, when their boss had suddenly insisted on putting it on reverential public display. It was all most confusing.

  The morning matured into a gorgeous, balmy afternoon, and after hauling my freshly serviced MIFA off the train at Pressig I rolled up warm tarmac to Probstzella. Its curious name had leapt off the map, and in a long and lazy sunset its looks matched. Low rays gilded the flanks of pine and Thuringian slate that hemmed Probstzella in, and cast a flattering glow over its winding straggle of grimy old homes. Opposite them lay the ghostly bulk of a red-brick railway station – one of the few that had linked East and West Germany in the old days, and in consequence now surrounded by a derelict sprawl of windowless buildings and weed-fractured concrete. And above everything, looking down on this unpeopled scene, an extraordinary red eminence sprouting angular pavilions and topped with a Gotham City turret.

  The Haus des Volkes was built in 1927 by Bauhaus architect Alfred Arndt, for Franz Itting, a philanthropist who had chosen to endow this remote and modest slate-mining community with a cathedral-sized community centre. By way
of thanks, Itting was imprisoned before the war by the Nazis as a socialist, and after it by the Soviets as a capitalist.

  As a GDR border town, Probstzella found itself declared an exclusion zone: ‘untrustworthy elements’ were banished from the town, and the ideologically sound comrades allowed to stay were effectively cut off from the rest of the country. Travelling out of these areas was awkward enough, but visiting friends or family marooned inside them – even for a cup of tea – demanded a permit that had to be applied for eight weeks in advance, and was turned down four times out of five. In consequence, just twenty years after it had welcomed its first workers, Itting’s Haus des Volkes was shuttered up.

  Following a long, dust-gathering vigil it reopened in 2008 as a hotel, though off season you’d hardly have guessed it: I rang a phone number stuck to the bolted door, and was given a code that accessed the key box alongside. Then I went in and didn’t see a soul until breakfast. I wandered alone down corridors and epic stairwells lined with shriekingly vibrant modernist murals, peering into the original bowling alley and a trapezium-vaulted, thousand-seat theatre, savouring all five floors of hard lines, smooth curves and lofty, slender windows. The grounds were similarly deserted and no less splendid, strewn with copper-roofed refreshment kiosks and leaf-scattered bandstands, each a sinuous study in brick and glass, like pocket pre-war Tube stations. It was creepy and wonderful in just the right proportions, and my well-appointed room was graced with a big bowl of complimentary Haribos. Should you ever find yourself in this neglected backwater – realistically by mistake – I would urge you to stay there. As you may already have worked out, it wasn’t expensive.

  I dined in a discoloured old pub opposite the station, next to a table of brazen smokers playing cards with one of those curious decks the continentals go for, all bells and acorns. Trains squeaked and rattled lethargically by in the warm night; line workers in orange jackets shuffled past the pub’s dirty glass doors. Whenever anyone came in or went out they moved through the room rapping a knuckle on every table in turn, mine included, accompanied with a small nod of greeting or valediction. How tremendously endearing, I thought, especially so as I’d just been made aware – courtesy of a phone call from home – that it was my birthday. These things pass you by on the road. By longstanding tradition I mark my special day with a curry, and happily settled for the daft national institution that is currywurst – a rare rebellion against Germany’s innate culinary conservatism, the resilient inertia of pork, cabbage and spuds. When the barman laid down my dish the card players interrupted their game to join in the bar-wide chorus of guten appetits. I toasted them with a doily-stemmed pilsner, then set about smearing my face and a tableful of maps and route guides in aromatic red gloop.