I just watched the trailer for the upcoming film, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, based on the John le Carre novel of the same name.  Many, if not most readers of this post will surely be familiar with the book, although I would understand if you never actually read it.  Le Carre’s spy thrillers can be awfully byzantine in plot.  James Bondesque action is not to be found, substituted instead by a complex psychological chess match between protagonists inhabiting a corrupt, gray world where nobility in deed and intent are as rare as happy, tidy endings.  It’s that very complexity and moral ambiguity that attracts me to le Carre stories, and Tinker,Tailor is certainly among his best.  The film has an A-list cast of British stars, including Gary Oldman, Colin Furth, and John Hurt.  Frankly, I can’t wait for its Christmas season release.

Watching the trailer, I was carried back some 30 years to a time when I lived right on the marchlands of the Cold War.  It was 1981, and I was a 23 year old single man living a mile from the Berlin Wall.  Granted, Cold War tensions ran much cooler in 1981 than in the far hotter days of 1961 or even 1971.  By the late ’70’s and early ‘80’s, few feared an outbreak of World War III, at least not one instigated between the United States and a still formidable USSR.  Living in Berlin, however, one could not escape the obvious reality that the Cold War still existed.  With an apartment on a major thoroughfare in the American Sector of the city, I often watched with wide-eyed wonder as M60 tanks rode down the cobblestoned street just a few feet from my second floor window.  Nothing like that ever happened in the Waco, Texas neighborhood I had lived in during the previous three years!

Before moving to Berlin, I had spent the summer studying German at a Goethe Institute campus in a small suburb of Munich.  Once the semester came to an end, I caught a train for the overnight ride to Berlin.  If you know your German geography, you’ll remember Berlin is located in far northeastern Germany.  During the Cold War, West Berlin was an island deep within Communist East Germany, which was euphemistically called the German Democratic Republic, or DDR (for Deutsche Demokratische Republik).  To travel overland from West Germany to West Berlin, one had to ride several hours through Communist East Germany.  Unless you had a visa, you could not de-board the train before reaching your destination, nor could you interact with any citizens of the DDR while on the train.  It was very restrictive.

I will never forget that first train ride through the East German police state.  We reached the border of Bavaria, in West Germany, and Saxony, in East Germany, around midnight.  I rode in a compartment of six seats, four of which were occupied.  About an hour into the DDR, the train stopped at a small station.  A man wearing a black suit entered our compartment, turned on the light, and forced his way to a window seat.  With the light on, he proceeded to open a newspaper, loudly turning the pages with no regard for the others in the compartment who wanted to sleep.  When he finished the paper, he opened his brief case and shuffled through all manner of documents and folders, making a conscious effort to be noisy.

At least once after our new travel comrade had arrived, the train attendant entered our compartment to check our passports.  The attendant did not, however, ask to see a passport or any other documentation from our black-suited companion.  He did not even glance up at the attendant; he merely continued to shuffle papers and read with as much noise as possible.  After an hour or two of this rudeness, the train came to another stop in the middle of the night, and the man left as abruptly as he had arrived, pushing his way past everyone else, making sure no one slept through his exit.  Once he was gone, I asked the others in my compartment who that guy was.  One answered in German, “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.  I’m just glad he’s gone.” 

In the months that I lived in Berlin, I often crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie to spend the day on the east side of the Wall.  I found East Berlin fascinating, from the wide open plazas of the Mitte, with its modern and glossy, though cheaply constructed post-WWII government buildings, and the relatively few 18^th and 19^th century survivors of Prussia’s neo-classical past, to the 1930’s block buildings that once housed the Nazi bureaucracy, to the dark streets of Prinzlauerberg, where I could imagine what life was like 45 years earlier, when 80 million Germans lived under a regime that thrived on suspicion, repression, and demagoguery. 

I loved riding the rickety old street cars at night along unlit roads that had never seen neon or other artificial light beside than that emanating from the dim, low-wattage bulbs found inside small businesses and apartments along the way, or the headlights of the occasional Trabant, the little East German automobile that one might suffer years on a waiting list to purchase in this economy that refused to operate under the law of supply and demand.  Peering through a dirty streetcar window, I would try to catch a glimpse of what life was like in those sparsely furnished East Berlin apartments that were so different than the bulk of living quarters just a few miles away on the other side of the Wall. 

Sometimes I would try to engage a local in conversation, but that was almost never successful.  East Berliners may have been very curious about the life of a young American in their midst, but they were loath to show their curiosity publicly.  For all they knew, I was a Stasi plant.  Certainly, the Stasi police presence was always nearby.  Engaging in conversation with someone from the other side was not worth the risk of grabbing the attention of the secret police.  I’m sure those thoughts must have raced through the mind of Trudi, the beautiful girl behind the counter of a Berlinerstrasse pastry shop.  I talked a little bit about Trudi in a previous post in which a condom figures prominently.

A short drive from my West Berlin apartment brought me to the Glienicke Bridge, spanning the Havel River and separating Berlin from the city of Potsdam.  The Glienicke Bridge was a prominent landmark during the Cold War.  In fact, it was nicknamed “the bridge of spies” because it was used several times by the United States and the Soviet Union to exchange spies who had been captured by the other side during the Cold War.  From the western side of the bridge, you could see the old church spires of Potsdam in the distance.  This old city was once the residence of Prussian kings.  It is the site of Sanssouci, the great palace built by Frederick the Great to rival Versailles.  Sanssouci is now a World Heritage Site, the largest, in fact, in all of Germany.  Of course, Potsdam later became famous as the site of the Potsdam Conference, where Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Clement Attlee shaped the face of Europe for the next 45 years.  One of my great regrets is that I never sought permission to visit Potsdam while I lived so close.  The Glienicke Bridge is as close as I got. 

Standing on the western side of that bridge, I thought of another John le Carre book, Smiley’s People, which concludes with the defection of Karla, British agent George Smiley’s long-time Soviet nemesis.  Karla’s defection takes place under Smiley’s watchful eye on a bridge very similar to the one I was on.  George Smiley is the central character in many John le Carre novels.  He plays a relatively minor, but important role in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the film version of which starred Richard Burton, and might be the greatest Cold War spy movie ever made.  I do hope the filmmakers of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, perhaps the most widely read of le Carre’s George Smiley novels, will follow that one up with a new film version of Smiley’s People.  I’m glad the Cold War is over, but I love to relive those days in memory and in film.