Unsurprisingly my trip to Berlin (somewhere I have never been before) was tinged with a fuggy cloud of weariness, but I got through it all and didn't actually pass out until I was on the plane home.
It was a shame I wasn't a little bit more with it, but it was still a fascinating day, if only a little bit of a rush to fit everything in. We had a lot of places to see and a lot of people to talk to. The documentary for Radio 2 is ostensibly about David Hasselhoff's unlikely part in the bringing down of the Berlin Wall (his song "Looking for Freedom" was a popular anthem of the time and he sang it from a crane above the wall in November 1989), but thankfully is taking a broader look at the whole subject, so whilst being light-hearted in tone, also includes some more serious aspects of the division of Germany and its ultimate reunification.
We started by getting a cab to the Brandenburg Gate, where many great moments of history occurred, but none greater than the Hoff singing in a crane wearing a leather jacket covered in tiny light bulbs. We couldn't drive right up to the monument as they were dismantling seating as a concert had been taking part there, so our cab driver dropped us nearby. We found ourselves looking at a square composed entirely of concrete blocks of different heights and sizes, which looked like tombs, but also arranged in straight lines with pathways between them, reminding me of the ruins of Pompeii or a strange model village of windowless houses. It was eerie and impressive and immediately emotive. We guessed that it was a tribute to the victims of the Holocaust or maybe the unfortunate souls who had died trying to cross from East to West Germany (so many crimes against humanity to choose from) and sure enough
it is the Memorial to Murdered Jews in Europe. It takes up a vast amount of space, though I did say that I hoped the Germans didn't feel this made up for what they'd done. Maybe if the whole of Berlin was knocked down to build a monument they might be a per cent of the way to showing contrition.
It was nothing to do with our programme, of course, but it was an interesting and unsettling place to chance across. This city is filled with ghosts of its past.
I was to get a whistlestop tour of the city over the next nine or so hours, starting at the Brandenburg Gate where I interviewed a fan of Hasselhoff who had seen the historical performance. It was hard to imagine that once the Gate we were looking at was in a no-man's land between two great walls which stretched right through the city. Now there was a Starbucks on the East German side, as well as the hotel from which Michael Jackson had once dangled his baby.
I was accompanied by the producer, Simon, whose idea this had all been and a lady from the BBC in Berlin (who I won't name as I am thinking of writing something about her for the first episode of "As It Occurs To Me" - nothing too unpleasant, but I will provide her with some anonymity and I am going to attempt to not give too much away in the blog of stuff that will be in the show, but inevitably there will be some crossover).
Then we walked through streets that were once communist, but now very much capitalist and decorated with at least one huge poster of a sultry model in just her underwear (Stalin would be wanking in his grave if he could see this), and before that were filled with Nazis (we passed the square where the books were famously burned) and on to the DDR Museum, where I danced the Lipsi dance, the state approved and very unsexy answer to the West's decadent Rock n Roll grooving, with Melanie from the museum. Melanie also showed me a mock up of a typical East German living room, which to me looked pretty identical to the lounge of my Grandma from 1970s Middlesbrough. This might say more about the hardship of living in Teeside forty years ago than of living in the GDR.
Other highlights of the trip were a look around the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, which Hasselhoff had complained, had no record of his performance on the wall. Talking to the serious curator of the place about her efforts to commemorate all the victims of the Cold War period, the Hoff's mild hurt feelings still looked a little bit prissy. But again we could only see one room in the museum before dashing off to grab a quick sandwich before being driven around in a East German car by a French lady called Julie Robert. The car was the Trabant and back in the Communist Era there was a waiting list of years to get hold of one of these. It was rickety and uncomfortable and jolted along, with the bare minimum of extras, but again took me back to rides in my Grandad's mini. People in East Berlin had it easy. No one was trying to reunify Middlesbrough with the civilised world.
After this I got to have a look at one of the few remaining stretches of wall, though it was just impossible to really comprehend the scale of the thing from this broken two hundred metre section. Still it was a chilling reminder of how people lived in this city for so long and of the lack of freedom that both sides had in that post war madness.
And that was brought home even further by the last visit of the day, to the Stasi Museum, based in the HQ of Erich Mielke who spent over thirty years organising informants and bugging devices to be used on his own people, in the hope of finding anyone who dared to oppose the communist regime. A photo of all the people who worked in this building is on display at the entrance and they don't look like insane and paranoid monsters, intent on the destruction of personal freedom. But that is what these suited grey-haired men, along with the occasional smiling woman were up to. No cheap Haselhoff based laughs to have in here.
By now though I was flagging quite severely and rather relieved when the taxi arrived to get me back to the airport. Once there I had a big German sausage wrapped up in a bun, coated in hot mustard and a big glass of beer and it was one of the most delicious things I had ever tasted.
I had a couple more thoughts for the terrifying prospect which is the show of entirely new material that I would be doing at about that time next week (
please do come if you can) and then got on the plane and managed a quick snooze.
I got home to find yet another book that I have contributed to waiting on the doormat.
Shouting at the Telly to which I have contributed a short piece about the paucity of ambition of Gary Sparrow.
