Bridge of Spies

I spent twenty four hours in Berlin in December 1989, one month after the Berlin Wall was opened. It was the most interesting twenty fours of my life. The sense of being at the end of WW2 (brilliantly captured in The Last Shot by Hugo Hamilton) permeated the city. I had a letter of introduction to a friend of a friend, who lived in East Berlin, so I crossed the border at Checkpoint Charlie. I rang the friend of a friend from East Berlin (I had tried to do so from West Berlin but was unable to get a connection). He told me to take the underground to a particular station where we met. I spent an interesting evening with him. He was a man of the left and took comfort from the fact that although the Wall had been breached the GDR still existed. I told him that I didn't think it would last for much longer. That was why I made the trip in December. I felt that by the following August - the month I normally went on holidays - the Wall or the GDR or both would be gone. The Wall was, as far as I remember.

I had to be back at Checkpoint Charlie by midnight or wait until the next morning to get back to West Berlin. I couldn't find my way back from the underground station but a local guy guided me through the narrow streets to the Wall. We were running like hell to make it. I felt like I was in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or The Iprcess File. (A colleague in the office subsequently spread a story that the Russians had opened up on me. A few weeks earlier they would have!) I always regretted that I never even shook hands with my guide. I got back to Checkpoint Charlie at about 12.05 but there were a few other people there so they let us all through. On the West Berlin side, an Englishwoman, who said she was a dentist working in West Berlin (but in retrospect was probably a member of MI6), gave me a lift back to my hotel.

The next morning I headed straight for the Wall at the Old Reichstag near the Brandenburg Gate. (Presumably, the German Parliament is back there again.) I didn't know until then that the Wall was not the border, which extended for another six feet west of the Wall. This was to allow the GDR to police both sides of the Wall. (When an East Berlin policeman was patrolling on the western side of the Wall he was watched by an armed colleague.) I joined a large group of people who were chipping bits out of the Wall. (I got my piece mounted and still have it.) At some point during the morning, the East Berlin police emerged out of a gate and began to patrol the western side of the Wall. The chatting stopped, the tension mounted (not, however, to a dangerous level) and most people, including me, stepped back inside the barriers, which were placed there by the West Berlin police, I think, and marked the frontier between West and East Berlin. A few people, however, didn't stop and one woman lost her hammer to an East Berlin policeman. She had drawn back her right hand ready to hit the Wall (whatever it was made of it was not easy to knock bits out of) but he deftly took the hammer out of her hand and threw it over the Wall.  A few moments later, the East Berlin police reached the river (the Spee, I think), got into conversation with someone who looked like a notable of some sort, the tension dropped and we all went back to hacking on the Wall.

Steven Spielberg's film captures the atmosphere of Cold War Berlin very well, it seems to me, although I only experienced its dying embers. East Berlin was certainly a grim place, a complete contrast to the bright lights of West Berlin. Spielberg doesn't just capture the atmosphere of the city and the times but he also captures the absurdity of what was going on. He doesn't (?) set out to do this. He just tells the story of the swap of two spies but the Cold War, although dangerous and, at times, highly dangerous, was largely bogus (and mostly stable). The Cold War was largely driven by the military industrial complex of the West in pursuit of careers for generals and spooks, and profits for the arms manufacturers. I felt its bogus nature at the time, and it is even more obvious in retrospect just how fake it was. The MI Complex has no Cold War now so has had to resort to generating hot wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria to keep their profits up (which was the main purpose of the Vietnam War, the main hot conflict of the Cold War).

In some ways (and this too I felt at the time) there was an absurdity about the Cold War. Spielberg's film, again not consciously it seems to me, captures this very well. Vast amounts of treasure were wasted and not a few lives were lost (58,000 US troops in Vietnam alone but over a million Vietnamese citizens, guerrillas and soldiers) keeping the US MI Complex in profits. The great and the good of the West went along with it and the legal system was distorted by it. People's rights were trampled on, rights that Americans proclaimed then and now to be what the US was about but that its legislature, its court and its media ignored. It was ugly.

In the West, we were programmed to believe that the Russians cracked the whip and all of eastern Europe jumped. It was never that simple. The Russians dominated their alliance just as the US dominated NATO but other parties, like the GDR and indeed the Poles, also had skin in the game. They had their own agendas. Spielberg captures this very well, again without making a big deal of it. He lets the events tell the story. It would be interesting to see a good film maker (and Spielberg is the best there is; he will be considered by future generations as the Shakespeare of the 20th century) do a story on the tension between the West German State and the NATO powers that were "protecting" it.

Mark Rylance, who plays the Soviet spy being exchange for Gary Powers, gives one of the best film performances of the year. Despite the foolishness and absurdity of the Cold War (there is only one letter of a difference between "cold" and "cod"!), there were deeply committed people on both sides, although it has to be said that, in the West, most of the committed people were fools or knaves. There was no excuse for them not to see through what was going on. In a system as cruel and totalitarian as the USSR, and as lacking in the good things of life (compared to the West), those genuinely committed to it had to be people of high calibre. Rylance's performance captures that kind of integrity. Tom Hanks' performance is up to his usual excellent standard.

It is only twenty six years since the Wall was opened but it might as well have been 250 for all the relevance the Wall and the Cold War have to today's fast-changing world. In 1989, the US and the USSR dominated the world. Now the US is offering to "share" the world with China, which recognizes that kind of  pleading as a defeated opponent trying to stay in the game.

So, all has changed, changed utterly but you couldn't say that a terrible beauty has been born. I feel a certain nostalgia for the Cold War (but I haven't forgot its ugliness) and recommend Bridge of Spies to anyone who feels the same way.