Drafted
in 1953, after sixteen weeks of basic training I was sent to Germany to
serve with the occupation troops and had the good fortune of being
assigned to the The Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra.
In fall
of 1954 the orchestra performed a week in West Berlin. A couple of us
spoke German and decided visit East Berlin - I wanted to visit the
famous Bertold Brecht Theatre and get the feel of life in Communist
East Germany.
To
my recollection we were able to go across the border easily and
following a map, headed for Potsdamer Platz and from that center asked
directions for the theater. There was no performance and the theater
was closed, and we just wandered. We came across, and spent some time
inside, a large union cultural and sports complex.
Then we
came upon an attractively decorated good size music shop. Pretty much
had the full range of published scores and recordings. The prices were
ridiculous. Educational and cultural items were highly subsidized in
the East German socialist economy.
When the head of the store
showed his willingness to sell to us though we had not the required
East Zone ID that all residents were supposed to show when shopping, we
kind of went bananas. We bought as much as we could carry
comfortably, while the shopkeeper seemed to be perspiring knowing he
was breaking the law. On top of the subsidized low prices for East
Germans, we had the extra advantage that one American dollar bought
four West marks and then one West mark bought five East marks.
A
velvet cloth bound three volume set of the complete Beethoven Sonatas,
Peters edition, for the equivalent of a couple of American dollars.
Long play recordings of the best orchestras with world renown
conductors for a few coins.
When we got back and told our fellow
orchestra members, many of our colleagues headed out to the same store
on our next free morning or afternoon.
A friend, who recently
passed away, while a principal chair of a major American symphony
orchestra, somehow managed to bring out in multiple trips and mail home
the complete Haydn string quartets, parts and scores.
But
another string player had his booty confiscated by a border guard on
the U-Bahn, the overhead inner city train that ran through both zones.
When he couldn't produce the receipts and his required ID to purchase,
he was taken to an East Zone police station and given a stern lecture.
Knowing
that, on my next trip, I thought to slip a recording of a Shostakovitch
symphony by a Russian orchestra to the top of my pile of purchases as I
noticed a Russian soldier patrolling the isle of the U-Bahn as I was
returning. Sure enough, he halted next to my seat. “What is all that
you have there?” he said in German, looking at me quizzically, amazed
at the more than foot high stack of music and long plays on my lap.
“Andenken” (souvenirs), I answered with a shy smile. (I had begun to
sweat.) He reached over an picked the LP of the Moscow State Symphony,
read the label in Russian to himself, smiled back at me as he put it
back down, and said simply, “Gut,” in obvious approval of my taste,
turned away from me and walked on.
Interestingly, or shamefully, my sense of fair play, seemed
to have been overcome by that Yankee trader philosophy, which
superimposed itself as I made off with stuff that did not belong to me,
goodies intended for the economically poorer citizens of the German
Democratic Socialist Republic and their children. All I got for a bad
conscience afterward was to trade those ‘expensive' bound Beethoven
sonatas to someone for doing me a favor back home.
Our finding
that gold mine, took all our greedy attention away from seeing more of
the city we were performing in, and meeting more of its people as we
usually did while touring in Germany and Austria.
Eight years
later, when the Berlin wall went up, I thought to myself ‘they must of
had guys like me in mind when they decided to build it.'
This little story might illustrate how difficult it was, and still is, to build a socialist economy within a global
capitalist system.
For other reasons why the wall was built see William Blum, “
Another Cold War Myth - The Fall of the Berlin Wall”
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum10022009.html
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Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.
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