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Over at Travis Erwin's blog, he suggested writing about where you live. So I thought for a moment about writing about a place I once lived but no longer exists: West Berlin.

My introduction to West Berlin came by seeing East Berlin first on an overnight train from London. And this was only right. To understand West Berlin, you had to experience East Berlin. The two halves of the city acted as a strange looking glass and every morning, the Wessis woke up, looked at the gray concrete wall that slashed through the city, and reassured themselves they were living in the fairest land of all. The Ossis did the same but what conclusion they came to was never clear to me. And the Grenze Polizei weren't going to wait to find out.

The train, which had been sealed at the East German border 110 kilometers to the West, stopped in the morning fog in an enclosed area of barbed wire topped with razor wire while the East German Grenze Polizei brought out their German shepherds to sniff along the undercarriage of all the railroad cars for anyone who might have snuck on. It was possible, just barely, for a stowaway to climb up into the undercarriage and hang onto the pipes. The GPs came into the compartment I was in and I half expected them to be trouble. But, of course, they weren't. They didn't care about a U.S. citizen or where he was going. They only cared about East Bloc citizens and where they might be going.

Jobs were plentiful in West Berlin even if you didn't speak German, and I started working on the U.S. military base as a bartender in an Enlisted Men's club. A lot of movies portray soldiers as tough and grizzled. Mostly, I remember the enlisted men as scared and homesick. A disproportionate number of them had southern accents because of the military tradition of the South and a disproportionate number of them were black because the army was a better a deal than some other options. Almost all of the enlisted men had never been out of the country before they joined the army. Some probably hadn't been out of their hometowns. A proportion of them never adjusted to being in Germany and lived like monks on the military base eating at the military's version of McDonalds just to feel safe. Another segment found they had wings and flew off into Berlin every chance they got. It varied from individual to individual but wasn't related to their backgrounds, only if they were frightened or not of things that were new and different.

Rarely did the soldiers cause trouble but when they did, I would attempt to talk them out of it. Mostly it worked. These guys were 18 year old crewcut Americans who were brought up to believe that doing good was good. When talking failed, we had a guy named Nate who had tried out for the Philadelphia Eagles but didn't make the cut. Nate was nice enough and you could talk to him but he believed in overwhelming, rapid reactions to known threats. The fastest record he had bouncing a soldier was probably in the range of two or three seconds when he grabbed the offender by his belt at the small of his back and his collar and used the soldier's head as a battering ram to open the swinging doors. The enlisted man's club had two entrances. One led outside onto the street and the other led onto the base. If you didn't have a military pass, you weren't supposed to go on the base, but this was a while back before people started blowing up so security wasn't an obsessive issue. The street entrance let the Turkish girls come to the bar and every night we had a fair number trying to interest the soldiers into becoming boyfriends and then husbands. It's there I learned a  U.S. passport is a big deal to some people.

The only downside to the enlisted men's bar is they didn't tip very well. They did tip the girl who was the other bartender a bit more than me because she was a girl. The upside to the job was I also worked the Sunday morning shift at a cafeteria and on Sunday mornings, the army revved up their tanks and did a bit of parade outside the cafeteria windows. I never learned why they did this, but it was interesting to watch the M-60s and self-propelled howitzers go by. I was surprised to learn that tanks squeak like mice. They don't rumble.

I lived in a neighborhood near Dahlem but can't recall the name off the top of my head. The Spree Canal ran just behind my cluster of apartments and flowed a muddy brown. One summer evening, a friend and I took turns jumping off a high bridge into the canal which, looking back on it, probably counts as one of the most moronic things I have done since we couldn't see an inch past the surface of the water. The bridge was 30 feet high or so. But we lived, as you usually do when you're in your 20s. Except when you don't. The summer nights were short in West Berlin because of the latitude. The sun didn't go down until after 11 p.m. and was up again somewhere around 4 a.m. It could be exhausting if you were one of those sleepers who wakes up when it's light. Or maybe life was just a bit more frenetic .

There weren't any pre-war buildings left standing in my neighborhood and only important structures like Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe headquarters and the Reichstag were rebuilt at all after the war. The rest of the buildings were all built from scratch in the 1950s and the Germans built them square because that was easier. As a result, the neighborhoods were more functional than attractive. Down at the old  Regierungs Viertel, or government quarter, all the buildings had lines of repaired gouge holes leading up to the windows where the Russians, or maybe the Germans, machine gunned the defenders. But in West Berlin, you didn't have any burnt out hulks of buildings any longer. Instead, you had fast, bright, easy to install neon.

I once made the mistake of giving directions to a German friend by saying "you just go out to the Wall and there it is." She gave me a funny look and pointed out that if you wanted to get to the Wall, you could set off in any direction. A lot of people called West Berlin the world's biggest prison camp, but it didn't feel like one. A disproportionate number of young Germans lived there because of the Frei University and because under the terms of some treaty or other, they couldn't be drafted into the German army from Berlin.

In the West, the dominate feature of the skyline was the Ku'damm  Church. The West Germans left the bombed out church as it was after the war as a memorial. On the East side, which was officially atheistic, the East Germans built an immense radio/television tower. Near the top, they constructed what can only be described as a huge disco, mirror ball. I think the party comrades thought it looked modern. One of the weaknesses of communism is that communists have atrocious taste since the party leadership is composed of thugs, liars, and lawyers -- as if there is a difference. The big joke was that when the sun hit the disco ball, it reflected a perfect Christian cross. But by that time, it was too expensive for the cash strapped East Germans to do anything about it. So they had a Christian cross reigning over their atheistic city. The East Germans were murderous but also not nearly as competent as one might have feared. They did this sort of thing a lot. Eventually all the accumulated mistakes blew the Soviet Union to pieces.

The Wall stretched for miles and miles through forests, slums and high-priced neighborhoods. It was said that it was one of the few structures on earth that orbiting astronauts could see. The other being the Great Wall of China. The boundaries of West Berlin were huge. The city even had its own immense lake, Wannsee where women sunbathed topless because the Germans don't need much of excuse to do that sort of thing. The footprint of the city could have accommodated an occupying army of millions. At one time, it did.

On the West side, in most places, you could walk up to the wall, and the West Germans used it as an endless concrete canvas. They painted slogans, scenes, murals and just about anything else that appealed to them on the wall. Most of the art work was fairly good and the slogans were witty. The West Germans didn't want to have to look at schlock every day. And they didn't tolerate idiots who could only write their name, or "tag" the wall. On the East side, there was the death zone, a flat piece of open ground that lead up the wall that was covered by search lights. Weirdly enough, behind the death zone, they put in anti-tank barriers. I suppose the East Germans feared their own troops would use a tank to break a hole in the wall. I know all that because the West Germans built public observation towers that overlooked the wall. You could go up these towers and look out over the death zone. The Grenze Polizei had long since been disciplined not to react, but you could shout to them if you wanted. They didn't wave back.

I often went up the towers after we'd been in a bar, kniepe or nightclub drinking beer. The bars got stuffy and noisy and the towers always had nice cool air above the throng in the street and they were quiet. After 20 minutes cooling down, you could go back into a nightclub refreshed. The scene spread before you was always the same: the Wall, the death zone, the anti-tank traps and the searchlights swiveling around constantly looking for a shadow trying to make its escape. And just 20 feet away from Die Mauer as its called in German, the Wessis danced through the night to the latest rock tunes which echoed over the silent East.

Crossing at check point Charlie into East Berlin was a needless experience in bureaucratic nonsense. Here, the East German guards communicated by shouting at you and anyone else. It felt like being in prison because that's what the East was. In the border crossing station, they sometimes put you in a holding cell by yourself for a bit just to scare you but you always knew they weren't going to keep you there. Probably. They forced you to change 25 Deutsche marks, a solid currency, for 25 Ostmarks. The West marks were made out of nickel and steel and a five mark coin was a fairly hefty piece of change similar in size and weight to a U.S. silver dollar. The Ostmarks were made out of crumpled up tinfoil as far as I could tell. You culd bend the 1 Ostmark piece with your fingers.

At the crossing, you got a 24 hour visa. I heard about an American who didn't think the 24 hour visa was serious and overstayed his welcome. The Grenze Polizei put him solitary confinement for real until the U.S. embassy bailed him out. it probably cost a couple of thousand Deutsche marks passed under the table. The East Germans ran a lucrative business selling people to the wealthy West. They sold intellectuals, dissidents and just about anyone else who caused trouble to the West. For the East Germans, it probably seemed like a good deal to get 100,000 Deutsche marks while at the same time getting rid of a dissident play writer. The Wessis liked doing it also because it made them seem generous and enlightened. In the end, the Wessis had it right and the Ossis were proved to be incompetent.

For me, spending the 25 Ostmarks was a  chore. The shops in East Berlin never had much on display. They used to wrap boxes in Christmas wrap and place them in the windows to make it look like they had something to sell. At specialty stores, they sold what used to be called funk boxes before the digital age that were totally out of date compared to the West and cost more than the average East German worker made in three months. Imagine a radio-cassette player that costs $10,0000 and you get the idea. At Alexanderplatz, the heart of East Berlin like Times Square is heart of New York, they sold ice cream but your choices were vanilla, vanilla or vanilla. So you ate vanilla ice cream cones. If you were East German, you ate vanilla ice cream while dressed in a gray suit that didn't fit with a bad hair cut. East Germans looked ridiculous. You could spot them down the block. Except for the police and secret service people. Their uniforms were immaculate. But then again, in a society like that, they would be.

In the West, the Kuferstendamma Strasse was the big the scene for the super wealthy. They had mink coats for sale, Jaguars, Dom Perignon champagne and anything else that was overpriced for the sake of being overpriced. I couldn't afford any of it but I could get an ice cream on the Ku'damm as it was called. I usually got vanilla. I probably looked ridiculous and so out of place dressed in jeans and tennis shoes the rich Wessis could spot me a block away. Sometimes there wasn't much difference between the East and the West when you got down to it on an individual level. 

I took the U-bahn to the Ku-damm to watch the women with hard eyes and tight lips who were too thin and too pretty and too young on the arms of their old, fat lovers who wore Bavarian hats with the little feathers on the side. Some of the girls had a flaring beauty like a candle burning too brightly that comes just before it goes dark. Heroin does that. Parts of the U-bahn passed under East Berlin and the subway trains rushed through the vacant boarded up stations in the East without stopping. Dead, gray subway stations completely devoid of life and covered with four decades of dust, the very image of the love between the women in their mercenary relationships with the bourgeoisies. Sometimes the East Germans were right. The West was venal and had sold its soul for money. The only trouble was, the East Germans sold their soul for nothing.

In the East, the Vo-pos were everywhere and when you walked, you always were in sight of a Vo-po. Vo-po stands for Volks Polizei and it was how the East Germans solved their unemployment problem. Anyone who didn't have a job was put in a Vo-po uniform and told to stand around. And that's what they did. I never saw one actually do anything. The Vo-pos were also ridiculous.

West German TV programs tended to spend a lot of time on very insignificant issues in the way only Germans can obsess. Imagine a half hour talk show on the proper inflation pressure for your car tire. Or they produced very demented game shows where the host wore a lime a green jacket, plaid pants and honked a bike horn, The hosts generally carried on with foolish wheel spinning and they always pinched the bottoms of the buxom, blond contestants who were spilling out of their dresses. This caused the technicians to crank up the laugh track until there was a guttural roar coming from the TV set. Very German. I really thought the West German television producers were on drugs. They probably were.

Later on, I learned the East Germans became discouraged when they watched the game shows and realized they couldn't get on them. In fact, the West's broadcasts into the East were a key reason for the rising discontent in the East through the 1980s. There is something really tragic in the notion the West German game shows were a glamorous step up for those in the East.