Every now and then you find a little treasure, in this case it’s a book. A while ago, my friend Mark Reeder commented on something on FB, one of his friends once wrote a book about the last days of the divided Berlin. Being originally from Berlin I got this obsession about everything related to this city, and so I’ve read most of the German publications about the youngest history of Germany’s capital, from the first wave of Berlin books that got published by the end of the 90s like “Die Tickerlady“ (“The Dealer Lady“), a book about a young girl dealing drugs in one of the hardest techno clubs in the mid 90s “Bunker“, to personal favorites like “Der Klang der Familie“ (“The sound of the family“) and “Die Ersten Tage von Berlin“ (“The first days of Berlin“), books about the rise of subculture and techno in Berlin in the early 90s against the backdrop of the now reunited city. But all these books are about what happened after the Wall came down in 1989 - which makes “Once upon A Time In The East“ such a stand-out. It was published in 1992, it’s only available in English... and unfortunately it has run out of print a long time ago already.

The book was written by Dave Rimmer, a British music journalist who worked for Smash Hits, a very influential and successful pop music magazine in the UK in the early 80s. His first book “Like Punk Never Happened“, published in 1985, is about this era, when the UK ruled the pop world and the London-based Smash Hits was in the epicenter of it. In 1988 he felt he needed to “detox from celebrity“ and followed an invitation to West Berlin. In Berlin he met Mark and Trevor, two other British Berliners. Mark Reeder was already an old friend and quite a character to say the least, always dressed in a wild mix of military clothes and basically involved in seemingly everything (West) Berlin’s subculture had to offer. Trevor Wilson, a friend of Mark, was well-known in Berlin for publishing the fanzine “Ich und mein Staubsauger“ (“Me and my vacuum cleaner“) and had, in the words of Dave Rimmer, “a knack for wearing clothes that could make the most immaculately tailored item look like some moth-eaten rag from a second hand shop“. Very soon one of their favourite activities became Rimmers’, too: traveling excessively to East Berlin, followed by making lengthy holiday trips to Eastern Block countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Romania.

Dave Rimmer describes his fascination with Berlin as “a city that had been hit by just about everything the twentieth century could find to hurl at it“, and further “I was born a decade after the end of World War Two, but in my Newcastle childhood it was still around me. Sunday afternoon television was always showing patriotic war films full of Nazis. We read comics where Germans shouted “Achtung, die Engländer!‘ Later the war was replaced by the Cold War, I had read every Ian Fleming book.” James Bond in cinemas, Man from U.N.C.L.E. ion TV later, then Lou Reed made his “Berlin“ album and Bowie and Iggy even moved there. The divided city in the centre of the Cold War became more and more a mystique, or in other words: “Berlin offered an evocation of both childhood games and teenage fascinations.”

One of my favorite episodes is the story of the “Eastie Boys“, a fake band they tried to sell to the UK hype press, made up of two of their East Berlin friends. The Face bought the story right away, of course, as Dave Rimmer was a trusted music journalist. The only condition requested by the magazine was a picture of the band that showed they were actually in East Berlin. So they styled them as a Communist version of the Beastie Boys, with self made Trabant chains - the emblem of the most common car in East Germany - trucker caps, track suits of an East Berlin football team and so on, and took the photos in front of a very large Lenin monument. Unfortunately, the story was canceled before it really had the chance to take off. Shortly after, both of the “Eastie Boys“ ran into some trouble with the Stasi, the feared East German secret police. They were interrogated and released a little later - but from that point on the mood had changed drastically, the Cold War was getting real. The nothing can happen to us naÏvete of our British adventurers was gone - even though they knew nothing could happen to them, they realized that a lot of bad things could happen to their friends. Until that incident, they had basically simply ignored the fact that getting in contact with a citizen from a Western country was not welcome and could actually cause a lot of trouble.

The story ends in November 1989, but not in Berlin. On November 9th the Wall came down, aonly our friends missed it. A day before they took off to a long planned and already paid trip to Romania. Where they were headed, no one knew or cared about what had happened in the opposite direction. Somewhere in Slovakia they learned from a newspaper, that three days earlier the Berlin Wall had come down.

Dave Rimmer finished the book in 1991, it was published in the UK in 1992, and even though he still lived in Berlin at the time, a German version never came to be. Besides the great and sometimes unbelievable stories, he wrote it with a great love for detail and many on point descriptions of both parts of the divided Berlin. Dave Rimmer was there, he was an eyewitness of the last days of the Wall, he experienced these last days in his very own way and did his fair share of mischief - and he didn’t wait long to write it all down. This makes this book so special.

25 years later, Dave Rimmer is still - or again, to be precise - in Berlin, so Lodown sat down with him over a drink to chat about the book and how he remembers the events that triggered writing it.