The Other Berlin

His name is Karlheim Nobst and he plays piano at East Berlin’s fashionable Metropole Hotel. Something by Beethoven would seem appropriate, but Nobst prefers popular melodies that he feels are dearer to the hearts of American guests. While waiters prepare flaming dishes, Nobst offers themes from the movies “Love Story” and “Casablanca” as well as Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

It wasn’t exactly what a colleague and I had in mind when we checked into the Metropole, although it brightened an otherwise drab evening in a city that still seems far too dark at night, too gloomy, too melancholy. While East Berlin lays claim to the majority of the divided city’s historical monuments, it is West Berlin that keeps up a constant,steady beat, whether 4 o’clock in the afternoon or 4 o’clock in the morning. In the long years since I visited Berlin the first time, the skyline in the Soviet sector has changed, but the gloom remains.

Since that earlier visit, when I rode a bicycle through Communist-controlled Brandenburg Gate, the Wall has risen. In 1959 the streets were deserted as I pedaled past the newly refurbished Communist Party headquarters and dozens of buildings still scarred by a war that seemed barely ended. Khruschev was in power, and posters of the Soviet leader were plastered on buildings throughout East Berlin.

At Treptow park I stopped to photograph Soviet soldiers at the Russian War Memorial and in turn they photographed me, their only emotion being one of curiosity. On this current visit to Berlin the memory remains of a 10-year-old girl playing with a Hula-Hoop while I pedaled by, recrossing the border, beyond deserted and decaying Kaiser Wilhelm Palace and a former shopping center that lay in ruins. It was dusk, and re-entering West Berlin with its bright lights was like leaving a place long dead and discovering new life.

These were desperate days when East Germans desiring freedom crossed into West Berlin by the thousands. On the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, East German troops began building the wall that was to divide Berlin. The masses leaving the East not only threatened the economy but were an embarrassment to East Germany. Barricades were put up. Barbed wire was strung across Potsdamer Platz. Slowly the Wall took shape until today it stretches for more than 100 miles along the frontier that divides East and West Germany, a barricade that Chancellor Helmut Kohl described on the Wall’s 25th anniversary as a “monument to inhumanity.”

Miles of graffiti smear the West side--sketches and words that read “Ruski go home” and “Russians get out of Poland” and “The wall will fall.” Still, even while President Reagan has vowed that the Wall will come down, a second wall has risen behind the first, with guard towers and floodlights in this no-man’s-land in between. Now 13 feet high, the original wall makes escape all but impossible. On the West side the curious climb bleachers, eavesdropping on East Berlin and the spot where Hitler died while the city fell.

This gray and desolate sector, slumbering in its gloom, had been the center of the old Berlin that was alive with department stores and boutiques, coffeehouses and cabarets.

Nine crosses rise near the Reichstag in memory of East Germans who died trying to scale the wall. Few attempt the Wall anymore, although last August an East German and his girlfriend and their infant son escaped in a dump truck driven by the man in a daring, barrier-bashing dash through Checkpoint Charlie while East German guards shattered the truck’s windshield with gunfire. In earlier days, East Berliners leaped from apartment windows on the East side of the wall into nets on the West. Some landed successfully. Others missed and lost their lives. Others made daring flights in homemade gliders. Freedom seemed always worth the risk.

Checkpoint Charlie, with the Allies on one side and East German guards on the other, continues to express the stark reality of a divided city. On the Allied side, tourists crowd a small museum filled with artifacts relating to the daring tales of men and women who risked their lives to reach the West. There is an Opel automobile with armor plating in which five escaped through Checkpoint Charlie and the suitcase in which a woman was smuggled across the border.

There are the vivid pictures of tunnels dug beneath the Wall, one permitting 29 to escape. In addition, there’s the poignant story of Peter Fechter, 18, believed to be the first East German killed while trying to scale the Wall near Checkpoint Charlie. Gunned down by the East Germans, Fechter fell backward on the eastern side of the wall shouting, “Help me! Help me!” Seventy minutes later, East Berlin police carried the dying boy away while West Berliners threw stones, shouting, “Murderers!”

While visitors study the displays, others gather at a coffee stand, ordering hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza and soft drinks in an incongruous twist to this drama of death and daring.

It is through Checkpoint Charlie that tour buses frequently are stalled by overzealous East German guards in a tedious examination of passports and parcels. At best, the bus trip is a whirlwind visit into the Soviet sector for passengers wishing to say they’d seen Communist East Berlin.

In contrast, we took the S-Bahn, the elevated train between West and East Berlin, arriving at the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof where immigration officers studied our passports and charged us the nominal fee for a transit visa. There is also a 25-mark currency exchange requirement for East German marks that are worthless in the West.

Leaving Friedrichstrasse Station, we were met by a young lad who volunteered to lead us to our hotel. A night in East Berlin had seemed fascinating. As it turned out, it was an exercise in boredom. Americans have the choice of two hotels, the deluxe Palast or the pleasant Metropole that faces the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof and the International Trade Center.

A Stirring Setting

With its 600 rooms and a dozen restaurants and bars, the Palast-hotel could be a transplant from the Las Vegas Strip or Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. On the other hand, the setting stirs the senses, particularly if one lucks out with a room facing the Spree River and the imposing Berlin Cathedral on the opposite shore. Hotel windows also take in East Berlin’s 1,200-foot television tower with its revolving restaurant perched at the top with an eye on the West.

From the Palast it is a convenient stroll to Alexanderplatz, Museum Island, the State Opera House and East Berlin’s showcase avenue, Unter den Linden. Still, with its mini-bars, TVs, direct-dial telephone and car hires, I got the impression this could be a Sheraton or a Hilton and that I’d never left the United States.

My choice was the less ostentatious Metropole, which is also slick but considerably less pretentious. While it, too, features mini-bars and TVs, the mood is considerably more downbeat. My only caution would be to request a room at the rear to avoid street noises and the clatter of trains rattling into Friedrichstrasse Station in pre-dawn hours.

Guests at the Metropole gather in a cozy bar on the mezzanine for martinis that are drier than a dust devil spinning in the Sahara. Others, weary of hoofing it across the city, steam away the aches in a sauna and take swims in the hotel’s indoor pool. For big spenders a couple of yachts are up for hire, and a horse cart awaits at the door.

Haunting Silence

Still, the night outside was hushed. Alone, we walked the streets, hearing only voices from a second floor boite near Friedrichstrasse. In a city of 1.1 million, the silence was haunting. Granted, a few pubs remain open, but for the most part life in East Berlin folds early.

Meanwhile, Karlheim Nobst knocks out those show tunes and big-band melodies in the Metropole’s specialty restaurant with its candlelight and pretty waitresses. Nobst, 58, has entertained at the hotel for nine years. And although he has acquaintances in California, the Wall is an obstacle that separates him from the Golden State--even if he wished to hoof it no farther than a pub in West Berlin.

He’s content, he says, but one wonders. Just as I wonder about the nun the immigration cop scrutinized as I was entering East Berlin, asking her to face him squarely, then ordering her to show her profile before being allowed to leave.

On the surface, it seems innocent enough as one goes through the entry-exit formalities, but stark drama is staged daily as East German police take no chance that one of their own will slip away to the West.

While East Berliners are verboten at the Palasthotel and the Metropole, likewise Westerners are shooed away from East Berlin’s other hotels. When I dropped by the Hotel Unter den Linden around the corner from the Metropole, the receptionist said flatly, “Sorry, no rooms.”

“None?”

She shrugged. “I am sorry, not for Westerners.”

After doing the sights of East Berlin, we took a cab several miles outside the city to a restaurant in the bourgeois village of Pankow. En route the driver grumbled about the Volga he was driving.

“Made in Russia,” he said. “Lousy car!”

Moods Change Rapidly

Although we were picking up atmosphere of the sort tour groups generally miss, a recording of “Strangers in the Night” while we dined wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, even though several comrades were tapping their tables in tune with the West.

Still, the moods change rapidly in East Berlin. A few blocks away we passed a home for the indigent where a plaque at the entrance told how 29 Jewish youngsters were marched away to their deaths at Auschwitz during World War II.

Both Berlins are preparing for the city’s 750th anniversary in 1987, with East Berlin reconstructing showplaces of the 18th and 19th centuries. Scaffolding surrounds a cathedral near Unter den Linden, and the Grand, a deluxe new hotel for Westerners, is on the rise.

Friedrichstrasse is being gussied up for the occasion, with the new Wintergarten spotlighting an enormous new shopping arcade with dozens of restaurants, bars and coffeehouses. Frederick the Great, missing since World War II, has remounted his horse on Unter den Linden.

The jubilee will remind visitors of the renowned artists and the old satirical cabarets that made Friedrichstrasse famous before the war. East Berliners insist Friedrichstrasse again will become the city’s slickest shopping street.

Jubilee Year Ahead

Still, it is West Berlin that promises a jubilee year devoted to a mixture of the arts and entertainment the likes of which Berlin hasn’t experienced in years. (See today’s Travel Tips Column, Page 3, for details.)

As West Berlin gears up for the biggest show in its history, the city’s famed Tiergarten is being transformed into an amusement park with 19th Century steam-driven rides and other nostalgis touches. At the same time, crowds continue to gather in cabarets throughout the city, just as they do 365 days a year . . . even when there is no particular excuse for celebration.

Night and day, West Berlin seldom misses a beat--whatever the hour, whatever the season.

Meanwhile, across the gloomy corridor dividing the two Berlins the hour grows late and Karlheim Nobst plays old Glenn Miller melodies and dreams of another world.

For an information package on Berlin’s jubilee celebration, contact the German National Tourist Office, 444 S. Flower St., Suite 2230, Los Angeles 90071, or telephone (213) 688-7332.