In 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Observer Magazine sent Andrew Ross to the reunited city to witness the ‘sexual licence of West Berlin making tentative moves eastwards’ and to find out what had happened to the ‘artistic energy’ of the West (14 April 1991, ‘East Berlin welcomes back the cabaret’).
He started out at the O’Bar. ‘It’s 2am in western Berlin and the night, as usual, has just begun,’ he wrote, before moving on to the House of Young Talent until 4.30am to join ‘about 4,000 at an all-night techno rave party’.
Meanwhile, over in the east at Sophienclub, co-owner Steffen Fuchs is shooting an advert to be shown in western Berlin cinemas to attract ‘interesting’ faces – ‘artists, jazz people’ – to the club. ‘Now, we have normal people,’ he says, dismissively pointing to a ‘bearded student-type in a scruffy sweater’. The strategy to lure Berliners from the west seemed to be working – there were ‘fashionably dressed-down Wessis, fur coats tactfully stowed in the boots of their BMWs’ lined up outside the club and the bar was packed.
The excitements of the west were ‘all now available to the Ossis, Berlin’s long-lost, fun-starved cousins from the East’… but, wrote Ross, ‘the tears and joy when the Wall came down have long since given way to fear in the East, loathing in the West, and a sense of loss on both sides.’ One of the westerners complained bitterly that, ‘Now we’re the shopping centre of the East. We’ve gone from the Berlin Wall to the Berlin Mall.’ There was even ‘some creeping nostalgia for the old days’.
But clearly there were new opportunities to be had. ‘State-run youth clubs have closed, replaced by peep shows and slot machines,’ though ‘most Ossis stay at home and watch TV’. And, as we know, many of them were watching people watching TV, too, and no one would have been nostalgic about that.
