Free 1989 by Peter Millar

he had come close to sparking World War III by sending in a flash report late one October night that massed tanks were heading for the city centre (and by implication West Berlin). He was right, but only just. And his interpretation of the ‘evidence’ of his eyes was dodgy to say the least. They were being redeployed for the next day’s ‘Anniverary of the Republic’ military parade. To be fair, as Erdmute insisted I should be, that had been just four months after JFK’s ‘Berliner’ speech, and only two years since Western tanks and EastGerman soldiers had faced each other on the night the Wall was built. It still gets a bit of a laugh though in journalistic circles.
    Erdmute also lived up to the stereotypical Prussian love of order. Every word of copy sent to London since 1959 had been kept, neatly arranged in chronological order on yellowing telex paper in box-files stacked like ministerial archives around the walls of the office. This orderly filing system had the curious result that such historical gold dust as reports of the first reactions of Berliners to the building of the Berlin Wall and the eyewitness account of the Reuters man who was the first to pass through it, were buried amongst obscure coverage of football results. One such game between Lokomotiv Leipzig and Ballymena, Northern Ireland, was the first story it was my privilege to file; a rude reminder that even in the espionage capital of the world the job wasn’t all glamour.
    There was also a cupboard off the hallway which contained a flush toilet and a pile of yellowing newspapers: Neues Deutschland , the official organ of the central committee of the Communist Party, also dating back to the opening of the office. Erdmute liked to portray this pile of decaying newsprint as a secret treasure trove, it being theoretically illegal to hoard old newspapers, for two reasons: firstly, it was considered wasteful in a society where recycling was done for economic rather than ecological reasons, but also because the communist authorities regarded archive material as something only they should control: history was also deemed to be at the service of the party.
    Erdmute was not a party member. But she was an employee of the communist state. Her contract with Reuters was handled through the wonderfully named Dienstleistungsamt für Ausländische Vertretungen , the ‘agency for provision of services to foreign representations ’, DLA for short. It was to the DLA that any Western body, be it embassy, company or news organisation was obliged to apply if they wanted to employ East German staff. The DLA was then paid in West German Marks, and paid its workers the same sum in East German Marks, which on the black market were worth barely a quarter.
    If the British Army had shown me West Berlin from the air, Erdmute showed me East Berlin by car, a bottle-green Wartburg– named for the castle where Martin Luther took refuge in the Reformation and a significant one up on East Germany’s most common runabout, the Trabant (for a start the Wartburg’s chassis was actually made of metal). ‘Soviet Embassy, British Embassy, Humboldt University, Foreign Ministry, Alexanderplatz People’s Police Station,’ she would rattle out as we whizzed along the broad, empty thoroughfares. ‘Marx-Engels Square, Council of State building , Palace of the Republic’. The last of these was a giant showpiece conference/concert hall cum cultural exhibition centre, built on the site of the old Hohenzollern Kaisers’ palace, bomb-damaged but torn down by the communists in 1950 as a political statement. The asbestos-ridden Palace of the Republic has since been demolished and a replica of the Hohenzollern palace is being re-erected, including the only bit that survived, having been preserved by Erich Honecker, the de facto dictator, as a balcony for his Council of State building.
    She would test me on what I had learned that day back in the office over coffee and biscuits provided by