Previously: 40 Years in Beer, Part Twenty-One: Those legendary working beers with the FDJ in the GDR.
There was a faint glow, and an aura of something flickering amid barely discernible sounds of distant people conversing in an alien language. Apparently a herd of elephants camped somewhere to the rear, occasionally bellowing fair warning.
Flat on my back and shirtless, but providentially still wearing pants, I felt sore all over, like I’d just finished running a marathon or boxing a couple of rounds with Mike Tyson.
It seemed I was marooned in a foreign land, emerging from the haze of a mysterious coma, but in fact the coma was self-induced and the destination purposeful, even if the precise whys and wherefores remained elusive.
24 hours earlier I’d spent a final evening in rigid, doomed East Berlin, drinking voluminous quantities of Wernesgrüner Pils with my friend and workmate Jeff prior to departing on the overnight train to Copenhagen.
In the company of a few dozen westerners, we had spent three weeks in the German Democratic Republic (otherwise known as East Germany) working as employees of the East Berlin parks department, followed by another week of quasi-touristic revelry in Rostock and Dresden.
Now it was September 2, and I’d been in the East Bloc for the better part of three months, first in Czechoslovakia, then the USSR, and finally East Germany. Experiencing communism in these places was like taking a graduate-level university course in sheer weirdness. It was exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure, and I was ready for a change.
Up to this point, my 1989 travels had been largely routine given their specialized locale, and nothing had gone seriously wrong, but the law of averages was about to catch up with me over the three-month coda to come, and the misadventures began that final evening in East Berlin.
I’d sensibly checked my backpack at the rail station’s left luggage desk, all the easier to drink beer unencumbered until the time came to reclaim the bag before boarding the train for Copenhagen. It was a tremendous buzz kill to return to the desk at 21.00 and discover I’d lost the claim ticket.
If you think the TSA’s invasive bureaucracy is bad here in L’America during the era of permanent terrorism alerts, try imagining the 1940s-era, by-the-book-you-idiot-foreigner approach to verifying one’s identity and ownership of belongings amid Stasi-infested East Berlin,...Read more
