Complicated times, well worth reading, I learned a lot. Here's my little story vignette.
While living in Germany in the late Seventies / early Eighties I took a trip to Berlin. This was well before the wall fell of course; you could do day trips into E Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie though, so I did, being game for anything at that stage of my life.
My first experience minutes after leaving the border was to become a survivor of a kamikaze hit-and-run Trabant attack by two E German border guards, and it's etched in my memory. Me and two American freaks that I'd met on the u-bahn were crossing Unter Den Linden on a pedestrian crossing.
As the Trabant (it was pale blue) came towards us with the light behind it I could see the silhouette of the fat passenger who had the military hat and an AK47 prominently at the slope. As they got within range the skinny driver (it struck me at the time I was in a Laurel & Hardy movie) actually hit the gas and steered off track straight towards us. We three scattered in a cloud of blue oil smoke. It was probably really funny to witness if you were an uninterested observer.
We picked ourselves up off the famous boulevard of broken nazi dreams and shortly afterwards we found ourselves ordering a beer in a bar in some wind-blasted sterile E Berlin square under the baleful eye of the communications tower. 30 minutes later we were still waiting to get served.
I couldn't wait to get back to W Berlin. I played chess in a bar until the early hours with a Bundeswehr draft dodger, probably got drunk, I don't remember, and had a great time for the rest of the trip.
The E Berlin experience turned me off communism for life, after having been at least fairly sympathetic, to the ideal I realized, up until then. Ever since that day I've been strictly middle of the road, but not any road I can get mowed down by a bigoted moron in a crap plastic car or any other weapon of war.
