A City Near The Polish Border

When I was in my teens, I read John le Carré's novel "A Small Town in Germany" because it combined two of my favorite topics - spy stories and Germany. Nowadays, I can't imagine that I ever enjoyed reading anything so thrilling or, let's face it, serious. Apart from reading the magazine "Vanity Fair" every month, the only literary material I'm interested in today is light-hearted, chic lit stuff, comedy, or at a stretch, something clever by Stephen Fry.

While I fully understood everything that was going on in "A Small Town in Germany", I think the only thing I probably didn't appreciate fully was the title. I mean, the story as I remember it centers around Bonn, and maybe Bad Godesberg, a suburb of Bonn. This was the town that had been chosen as the "temporary" German capital after World War II and of course the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Berlin, the original capital of Germany, had basically been cut off from the rest of the country by the creation of the East German State (the German Democractic Republic) when the Wall was built. Only West Berlin, which was "supervised" by the American, British and French forces, remained a part of West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany.




This meant that West Berlin existed as a small island of the West completely surrounded, and for a very long way all round, by the East. It was an utterly ridiculous situation, which only came to an end in 1989 after the Berlin Wall was torn down.

During the existence of the German Democratic Republic, the small town of Bonn was chosen as the capital in order to avoid a larger town, such as Cologne or Düsseldorf, becoming the new capital and not wanting to relinquish that status once the re-unification of Germany had taken place. However, Bonn was so small that if you blinked you missed it.

I only realized what John le Carré had been waffling on about when I was sent to Bonn as a student to do an internship there back in the late 1970's. My friend, who was also on an internship, and I arrived in Bonn after having spent 3 months studying in Paris. We got the train in from Bad Godesberg (where we had been put up in a small Pension) and left Bonn central station to discover the nation's capital at 8 o'clock in the evening. We turned right and walked around as far as we could and I swear we ended up back at the station around 8:20 p.m.

Thinking we must have missed something, we started off again, taking a slightly different route, only to end up 10 or 15 minutes later back at our starting point.

Of course, all the embassies and companies, such as they were, were located in Bad Godesberg. That was the little suburb of Bonn which was actually much more attractive though of course even smaller, not to mention even more residential! You could literally be walking down a street full of ordinary houses and a pub and behind some hedge you would glimpse a peek of some consulate or other. It was all quite extraordinary.

Last week I was in Berlin. Since the Germans regained their capital, they have poured money into it to once again turn it into a representative capital city. Particularly the East, which let's face it looked pretty blinking awful for several years before re-unification, is now literally sparkling and shiny new. There's no confusing this 21st century style icon with the almost invisible little (capital) town of the 60's, 70's and 80's. That having been said, it's located extremely far away in the East from the rest of Germany, most of which is (still) happening in the West. And not only is it surrounded by very little, this very little is practically unknown to those in the West (where most of the population and industry are still located).

If John le Carré is looking to write another novel about Germany, he might do well to write a sequel entitled "A City Near The Polish Border".