Dancing in the strasse before the Wall came tumbling down in ’89

In August 1986, 25 years after the Berlin Wall was built and just three years before it came down, the West Berlin radio station I was working for sent me onto the Kurfürstendamm to do a vox pop. How many West Berliners thought the Wall would still be standing in another 25 years? After a couple of hours stopping passers-by, I couldn’t find one who believed the Wall would be gone in their lifetime. I got the feeling that most of them wanted life inside their walled enclave to stay just the way it was, and I didn’t blame them.

I had arrived in the city the previous year aged 24, with no money and few apparent prospects after an abandoned Classics degree and a short, forgettable career as a professional actor. I did have an introduction to a man called Peter Leonhardt Braun, the head of documentaries at Sender Freies Berlin, the city's public service broadcaster. He decided that the brief history of disappointment and underachievement that was my life thus far was so gripping a story that it must be shared with the broader public. He would arrange for me to be interviewed on the radio and listeners would be so impressed that they would call up to offer me work and a place to live and I would be on my way. In fact, there was an English language station across the street, so why didn't I go over and see if they too would like to interview me about my extraordinary life?

An amazing story to tell

I had my doubts, but as I made my way across the street they were pushed out of the way by the force of flattery and my growing sense that Herr Braun was probably right and I really did have an amazing story to tell. The English radio station manager listened quietly as I spun it out, enjoying the sound of my own voice all the more as it went on until I realised I was losing his attention and I finally stopped.

“Well we don’t want to interview you, obviously,” he said. “But I think we can offer you a job”.

I enjoyed the serious-sounding title of Senior Reporter but my main function was to interview visiting celebrities (an elastic category, then as now) and to report on entertainment and nightlife, including a review of bars and nightclubs broadcast live from the location during the daily breakfast show. This meant that most of my life was lived at night within a West Berlin subculture that stayed out all night, every night.

After the Wall went up in 1961, most of West Berlin's big business and heavy industry, patriotic and civic-spirited as ever, fled to West Germany and many workers followed suit. To prevent further population decline, the government in Bonn poured massive subsidies into West Berlin, much of it into construction – and into the hands of corrupt public officials and developers. An enclave of western democracy and the free market system surrounded by communist East Germany, West Berlin was also a showcase for the western system.

Travel between West Germany and West Berlin was cumbersome, with just four transit roads through East Germany, which started and ended with intimidating border checks, limited air connections and rail journeys interrupted by inspections by armed border police. Two measures in particular helped to make the city attractive to a certain kind of young German – the abolition of the Polizeistunde, or statutory closing time, for bars and clubs soon after the Wall went up and the exemption from military service for young Germans living in West Berlin.

Free drinks all night

Low rents, especially in the districts closest to the Wall, and the easy availability of part-time work meant that if you worked two or three nights a week in a bar, you earned enough to live modestly but comfortably. Even part-time staff in the more fashionable places could become celebrities and if they had an interesting look, minor cult figures. Bar staff not only drank free themselves but could offer their friends (and staff from other bars) free drinks all night so it sometimes seemed that nobody was paying for anything at all.

The lack of economic pressure and the sense of being cut off from the surrounding world encouraged creative experimentation, free from any ambition to be professional or successful. Groups like Die Tödliche Doris produced music, art and performances without any consideration for the financial value of the final product or critical approval. Art and nightlife in West Berlin were entangled, with many of the most interesting artists working in bars and clubs. Some opened their own places, such as Kumpelnest 3000, where the wonderful, deaf waiter Gunter Trube held sway – and chose the music. Exil, a Viennese restaurant in Kreuzberg, was run by the Austrian writer and critical theorist Oswald Wiener. And Anderes Ufer, the first openly gay venue in Germany to leave its door open and allow the guests inside to be seen through a window from the street, transformed its interior décor completely for a new exhibition every month.

Perfect conditions for creativity

Despite the perfect conditions for creativity, most of the idlers I knew in West Berlin were not producing any art, or even pretending to be. Most just focused on living, enjoying the freedom the city offered to make up life as you went along. This was especially true for those of us who were gay, for many of whom West Berlin provided the first experience of living openly and happily as ourselves. Most Germans live in small towns of fewer than 100,000 people and West Berlin was full of young gay men from such places, which were still deeply conservative in the 1980's. Unlike its Anglo-Saxon equivalent, German gay culture remains rooted in its century-long history and each generation absorbs some of the cultural memories of its predecessors. So in the 1980s, when only a very special kind of young gay American still thrilled to the sound of Judy Garland or the Broadway musical theatre, every gay German in his 20s knew all the songs of Marlene Dietrich and Zarah Leander, to say nothing of the squealing 1970s Schlager of Marianne Rosenberg. You could spend all your time just being gay in West Berlin and many did, working in gay places, hanging out with gay friends and meeting an awful lot of gay strangers.

Germans living in West Berlin seldom visited East Berlin. You crossed on foot through Checkpoint Charlie or by the S Bahn railway through Friedrichstrasse Station, past grim, unsmiling border guards. The excitement was greater if you were carrying contraband, as I often was, usually in the form of books or music for people I knew in the East. The music of The Smiths was a particular favourite and I usually had a couple of cassettes of their mournful hits hidden somewhere on my way over.

Levi jeans and Dr Marten boots were also highly prized so one often crossed into the East wearing layers of clothes, to return later wearing some frayed replacements you had picked up over there. You had to be back in the West by midnight but there was usually time for a raucous session in one of the bars in Prenzlauer Berg, often ending in a deep, pointless conversation about politics. We usually agreed that both capitalism and state socialism had their pros and cons but we all knew without saying anything on which side of the Wall we’d prefer to be living.

I left West Berlin for London in 1988 and when I moved back two years later, it was gone, and so was my idle youth. The centre of Berlin shifted eastwards, Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte became the favoured districts for young Germans from the west and the old club scene of West Berlin was overtaken by vast new temples of Techno in the East.

The more dynamic of my West Berlin friends moved eastwards too and, a little older now, were happy to embrace the new opportunities to get rich and make a name for themselves. During the next 10 years that I lived in Berlin, always in the west of the city, I'd sometimes look around and ask myself where everyone had gone. Many of the expatriates left Berlin altogether, to return to New York or California or to find a new adventure somewhere else. But it took me a while to realise that many of the old faces from West Berlin's nightlife had vanished because they were dead.

Many parents learned that their sons, some still in their 20s, were gay the same day they heard they were dying. Many of those who stayed in Berlin to die are buried in a small cemetery in Schoeneberg, which I occasionally visit when I go back there. When I do, I think about the short, insubstantial, unremembered lives of so many who shone so brightly at night all those years ago and how, like West Berlin itself, it’s now as if they’d never been there at all.