Ich bin ein Irish shopkeeper - tales from the fall of the Berlin Wall

On her last trip to Ireland Beate Lemcke visited Deansgrange cemetery, in Dublin, to find the grave of Brian O’Nolan, better known as Flann O’Brien. After tipping a drop of whiskey for him over the gravestone, she finished the rest herself before heading to the cafe next door to warm up.

When an elderly couple inside heard why she was there, Lemcke says, the man began to recite A Pint of Plain while his wife told her how she used to see O'Brien's brother promenading on the seafront in Dún Laoghaire. "It's moments like this," she says, "that remind me why I go to Ireland."

If the Berlin Wall hadn't fallen – a quarter-century ago tomorrow – Lemcke might never have found her home from home in Ireland. For her and millions of other East Germans, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a chance to restart their lives, do their own thing and travel far beyond the former eastern bloc.

Lemcke’s first big trip, in 1991, was to Ireland, home of the writers she had long admired from behind the Iron Curtain. Since 1995 her love of the country has been her livelihood, through her shop, Irish Berlin, a bit of tweedy heaven in the heart of old East Berlin. Here she sells tweed jackets and hats, woolly sweaters and socks, Irish marmalade and porter cake.

Scurrilous Irish

It’s more cosy public living room than shop, a place where customers and friends pop in and out. “I need alcohol,” says one young woman brightly by way of greeting, leaving minutes later with two whiskey miniatures.

Soon after, a woman in a golden coat and a tweed cap pops in to say hello. What attracts her to Ireland? “The scurrilous manner,” says the woman. “It’s something we Germans just don’t have.”

When things quieten down, over a cup of (Barry's) tea, Lemcke explains her winding road to Ireland. Born in Thüringen, in East Germany, she was a 26-year-old arts journalist for one of East Berlin's state-run newspapers in 1989.

Sensing change in the air, she ignored the warnings of her editors and screwed up her courage to attend political meetings in the Gethsemane Church. She still remembers pushing her way past police lines and Stasi officers to step into the church sanctuary, where the talk was of reform, of challenging the leadership and of a new start for socialist East Germany.

Without the benefit of hindsight, easterners didn’t know whether their protests would bear fruit or prompt a violent crackdown. But they drew strength from their growing number.

“Courage takes time to build up, but when it does . . .” Lemcke says, breaking off thoughtfully. “There was a feeling of energy and possibility in 1989, something that’s hard to express now. It can’t be revived for anniversaries, and today’s fall-of-the-wall events are just tourism marketing. It annoys me sometimes.”

The months after November 9th, 1989, brought upheaval for 17 million East Germans – and for Lemcke. Her newspaper merged with another, then folded. Unemployed, she grappled with the new, unwritten rules of a capitalist system she had never known. Then she visited Ireland and found a new path and a new self.

“I am a different person in Ireland,” she says. “I come out of myself and find myself talking to strangers, doing everything you just don’t do here.”

In 1995 she turned her interest in Ireland into a new job and, with no retail experience, opened her Irish shop. Almost 20 years later, Irish Berlin is still here, on Grosse Hamburger Strasse in Berlin.

As her Jack Russell, Polly, dozes at our feet, time seems to stand still here. Irish Berlin is one of the few survivors in this street in the neighbourhood of Mitte, which has gone relentlessly upmarket in the last few years.

For anyone who lives in Berlin, remembering the fall of the wall is a time of reflection. Irish friends often ask me if, 25 years on, it’s still possible to differentiate between east and west in Berlin. It’s not so easy now when you walk the streets: eastern neighbourhoods, crumbling in 1989, have largely been renovated; the wall is gone, and the ugly gash it slashed through the city, the former deathstrip, has been filled again with buildings, parks, life.

But, for me, one striking difference remains: the people. As a pre-Celtic Tiger Irishman, without realising it, my circle of friends is overpopulated by former East Germans.

Less brash, more considerate

Generalisations are always problematic and utterly subjective, yet, for my tastes, I often find former East Germans less brash, more considerate and less superficial than their West German cousins.

The side of Germans that often grates in Ireland – perceived as a blunt, inflexible and even arrogant air – is, for me, more a product of western Germany than the east. Although the differences are less pronounced among younger generations of Germans, the older easterners I know have other qualities: they're often quiet, cautious, modest. But it is a mistake to underestimate their determination. Just look at the eastern German now in her ninth year in the chancellery: Angela Merkel.

This adds another layer of humour when I watch Irish comedians dragging up to play Merkel. Unwittingly, they project on to her so many western German cliches that the result is as wide of the mark as if they added David Cameron’s Oxbridge polish to their Enda Kenny impression.

Finding yourself on the same wavelength as many eastern Germans can be a pleasant surprise.

Back in her shop Lemcke suggests it comes from a flexibility in our characters, the product of learning to improvise and make do. “You couldn’t have survived in East Germany without solidarity from your friends and neighbours,” she says. “You had to know people to get things done.”

The last few years have seen another parallel, she suggests: the rising pressure, in Celtic Tiger Ireland or post-unification Germany, to consume, earn and show off. A shop seems like an unlikely place to hold consumerist pressures in check, yet that’s how Lemcke sees Irish Berlin: as much cultural embassy as shop, with readings and other events. It’s an East German carving out freedom in a capitalist system.

“If a consultant came in here to look at the books they’d shake their heads and say I need to grow and expand, but if there’s a lesson I’ve learned from the Irish, it’s to live in the moment,” Lemcke says. “Many Germans are always worried about the future, their pensions and what have you. As long as I have an eye on this year and halfway on the next, I think that’s fine.”

Despite the limitations of being a shop- owner, Lemcke still takes regular tours of Ireland to visit her 50 suppliers, such as Hanna Hats, in Donegal, or Carraigh Donn, in Westport.

Just how attached her German customers are to her Irish products – and Ireland – is clear from the stories she hears when they come back for replacements. “The saddest story was a man’s grandson whose hat was laid between two boards and sawn in two,” she says, laughing. “A man just called to say the Hanna’s tweed waistcoat he bought here was one of the highlights of his year. At moments like that I know why I’m here.”