On a grey September day I was one of three journalists from Fleet Street escorted through a new border crossing in Berlin, which was later to become known notoriously as Checkpoint Charlie, to begin our journey back to London. It had not been there when we went into East Germany a few weeks earlier. We had simply flown into the international airport in West Berlin and taken the underground to East Berlin to be greeted by our hosts, representatives of an external trading organisation.
A couple of days later the Berlin Wall was erected and for almost 30 years it stood as a stark symbol of division between the free world and the Communist bloc, incarcerating a entire nation within its own geographical boundaries. The 40th anniversary of its construction in August 1961 passed recently almost without notice. Its erection escaped our notice completely as we travelled through most of East Germany, visiting trade fairs, collective farms, factories and cultural institutions. Such was the state's control over the flow of information that at no time did anyone inform us that a mighty wall now separated us from our democratic brethren in the West.
Orthodox church
Our guide and interpreter was a former British army major who had defected to the East after the war. Surprisingly, he was of Jewish descent and came from Leeds. By the time he encountered us his English was a little rusty. To demonstrate that freedom of religion existed in East Germany he took us to an Orthodox church in a rural area. Unfortunately it was closed for the day.
"Look," he instructed us, "If you put your ear to the door you can smell the very sound of incest on the altar." Then, with the whiff of incense in our nostrils, it was off to the Leipzig Fair. Here the emphasis was as much on parading propaganda as displaying goods. There were slogans and posters everywhere. "Human rights and peace require the complete abolition of colonialism," a silk banner draped around a stand of heat-resistant plates declared (in English).
In the book section I picked up a volume entitled Our American Friends. It was obviously intended as an English reader for teenage students. One chapter was devoted to American heroes. The selection was fascinating, if hardly surprising. Heading the list was Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Their "noble and terrible story" told how they were sentenced to death on "framed charges of giving away atomic secrets" in order to frighten the workers of America into accepting an anti-Soviet policy. Another chapter contained "typical" American songs, swinging off with: "I'm gonna lay down that atom bomb/Down by the riverside..."
Soviet spaceman
The propaganda never slackened. In Erfurt I bought a box of matches to find the confident face of Soviet spaceman Titov smiling up at me from the cover. In Weimar the official guidebook to Goethe's house took up the story. It told how the historic building suffered severe damage in the "Anglo-American terror air-raid of 9 February 1945. However, with the support of the then Soviet Military Government it was reconstructed under great sacrifices and toils."
Along with the propaganda there was rigid bureaucracy with its mountains of red tape and carbon copies. The manager of a factory I visited referred to his administrative block as his "paper palace". In spite of these irritating obstacles, worthy efforts were being made by the East Germans to restore their economy. Unlike West Germany, which received billions of dollars from America to aid its industrial reconstruction programme, the East got nothing. Indeed, most of the industrial plants which remained after the war were dismantled and taken away by the Russians as reparation for German war crimes.
Consumer goods
"Five out-of-date blast furnaces -that was all we were left with," a politician told me. Certain industries, such as power and engineering, were given priority. Others, mainly those producing consumer goods, were neglected, with the exception of the china works at Dresden and the Zeiss optical plant at Jena, both valuable foreign currency earners.
As a result shops were drab and the consumers had no choice but to accept much that was shoddy and second-rate. For almost 30 dreary years the East Germans were ensnared with little chance of escape - until the Wall came down in 1989 just as quickly as it had gone up.