1. A German love affair

This is a story about Berlin, where I live, but it’s not about today’s Berlin. It is about the Berlin of the mid-1990s, which already seems like a completely different city. Then the town was struggling to sew itself back together again after the amputation of the Cold War. Cranes cluttered the skyline and East Berlin, with its grey facades pockmarked by Red Army shells, still felt like Eastern Europe.

Of course, I — like any other Brit raised on Len Deighton spy novel and Michael Caine thrillers — loved the constant reminders of the city’s Cold War past. That was why I had come here, after all. That was the reason I had developed my taste for German and Germany in the first place, and the reason I had continued with German at school after the one obligatory year. That was the Berlin I was interested in — of Checkpoint Charlie, of dissidents smuggled to the West in the boots of Trabants, of secret rendezvous with glamorous women who were probably double, if not triple, agents. Not to mention the decadence of West Berlin, home to all the waifs, strays and draft dodgers of the rest of the federal republic. In my imagination the subsidised island was associated with Iggy Pop and David Bowie sharing a flat in Schöneberg, Einstürzende Neubauten playing free gigs in abandoned factories, punks shuffling around as Nick Cave played in seedy clubs (I had watched “Wings of Desire” too many times).

After my tastes had broaded from spy novels to expat rock stars, it was a short step to other aspects of German pop culture. I got into Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter, Kraftwerk and Can, Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. Soon I was a certified Germanophile — something of a rare commodity in 1980s Edinburgh, where the one German kid at our school got subjected to endless Hitler jokes.

I felt superior to my friends at high school, who listened to Pink Floyd and watched “Highlander” while I was buying Faust records and borrowing “Angst essen Seele auf” from the arty video shop — one of the few German films it stocked. And all the time I dreamt of moving to Berlin, where people would finally understand me.