Where in the World was Kellie Hazell: East Germany, 1988

About this feature: As a military brat, I've moved a lot and seen a lot. My dad's job took us to Europe for nine years and gave me the opportunity to become a world traveler at a very young age. This series of posts will chronicle some of the more memorable trips.

Believe it or not, there's already a piece of this trip immortalized on the Internet. My ex was a photog for The Observer (Notre Dame's campus paper) and someone on the staff decided to do a piece about student perspectives on the 10th anniversary of the fall of the wall and my ex kindly supplied my name. Actually, now that I look at the date, I think we were still dating at the time. This is where my memory gets foggy, as I seem to recall doing this phone interview in the spring, but it was clearly the fall. All I know for certain is that I had a major biochem exam the next day and somehow managed to grab a brownbag dinner from the dining hall and gave the interview between bites with my notes and textbook spread out all around me on the floor. And the interviewer (probably the chick who wrote the article, but I really can't remember) was somewhat testy because she wanted me in the paper's offices to do a "proper" interview and snag a photo.

Seriously, the article was pretty cool, got front-page billing (including a quote from me right above my fellow Ramstein High School grad Luis Matos's smiling mug; he was the lead in a play of The Metamorphosis, he rocked, and this is coming from me who had to sit through countless rehearsals and performances on the sound crew), and was generally a fun little bit of egoboo for me. Even if the interviewer never managed to understand my status as a military brat in a foreign country. Rereading this thing, it comes off as if I'm a German national at times--which, if you were to believe the gal from one of my freshman year mixers, was true (no matter how many times I tried to explain the facts to her, she kept introducing me by saying, "She's from Germany"). The interviewer also doesn't get that there was also a wall--OK, so a hefty duty, Big Ass Fence with lots of nasty levels of barbed wire--along the border between East and West Germany. More than a couple of times, she tweaked quotes and used description that made it seem as if there was only a wall in Berlin. I also had that whole "little bit of knowledge" syndrome in some of my quotes about the tenor of the nation: I had taken a couple of classes in German language and culture at Notre Dame. Never fear, though; in the same volume, they also had a bigger article or three using quotes and analysis from the expert profs on campus.

But I'm not writing this about an article that's been the top Google result for my name for the past seven years. This post is about my trip through East Germany to Berlin in 1988.

As the article mentions, my dad had to go to a class before we could travel to East Germany. I'm not exactly sure what the class entailed, but given the nature of my dad's job and the mission of Hahn Air Base in general, it was probably in-line with the signs posted around the base hospital that said certain folks couldn't take certain drugs that might cause them to blurt out things they shouldn't. All I know for sure about the class was that it gave my dad a binder full of very explicit instructions and directions for driving from the East German border through to West Berlin. The instructions included pictures of each road sign and appropriate gas station and the time in which we had to complete the drive or else folks would come a-lookin'.

The first very tense moment came when we were at the border between East and West Germany. We couldn't roll down our windows. We had to press our open passports against the glass and wait. I remember getting a very stern "be still and behave" speech from both Mom and Dad. It wasn't pleasant. When we were through, the relief was short-lived as my mother kept that damn binder open in her lap, trying to stay as on top of directions as possible and the usual beauty of the German landscape abruptly changed from rolling green hills and valleys to yellow and brown fields and gray, drab buildings. We didn't stop anywhere along the route. At the border into West Berlin, there was another silent, passport-against-the-window check, but I rebelled against the intensity of the moment. I had been listening to a mix tape on my Walkman, and sought out some sort of release by replaying A-ha's "Take on Me" over and over while imagining the cute border guard falling hard for me and risking all to escape the evil government (don't remember if I called them communists or not--I probably lumped them in with the USSR; although it's just hitting me now that East Germany called itself the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which translates into the German Democratic Republic, while West Germany called itself the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which translates into the People's Republic of Germany; doesn't the latter sound more like a communist regime to you?). Of course, I tried not to stare too intently at the guy as I didn't want to draw any attention that would get us in trouble. I think after the eighth run-through of "Take on Me", I fast-forwarded to Wham's "Freedom" and conjured a significantly lighter day-dream that still amounted to this poor border guard falling helplessly in love with me.

Yes, I was ten. Hush, now.

We spent a day sight-seeing in West Berlin, and another day in East Berlin. That border wasn't nearly as tense, or maybe I was overloaded with serious situations and shrugged off any intensity. Might've helped that this time there were MPs within spitting distance along with all the trappings of the military lifestyle I knew so well. The trek through East Berlin was actually more interesting to me than West Berlin. Can't say why. Maybe because it was so different and yet so similar to the culture I saw everyday in West Germany? It only got a little weird when we stopped for lunch in a big square/plaza. That's when I noticed the East German military duo hanging around. I didn't quite put two and two together at the moment, but it still put an odd spin on the rest of the day, and I was happy to get back to the hotel in West Berlin. I'm not sure if my parents told me then or when we were home that we were followed and watched by the "bad guys". It puts a very odd, Clancy-esque pall over the trip.

As for actual monuments that we saw, I only remember three. The first is the Wall. I remember thinking that it wasn't all that impressive. I had built it up as something much more melodramatic and imposing, and it turns out it was just regular, old, spray-painted concrete. You could walk right up to it on the West. On the East, you had to admire its uniform gray paint job from a distance. I don't remember the bullet holes that Luis mentions in the article, but I'm sure they were there. The second monument I remember was a TV/radio tower thingy in East Berlin. I just remember it was tall, and we went up in it, and then we came down, and we might have gotten a snack at the base. At the time, I didn't understand why it was such a big deal that we should put it on our sight-seeing list, and I still don't. I'll see about tracking down some info on it, if I can remember anything else about it. (Here's the Wiki article on the TV Tower. Apprently it might have had some sort of "We are bad, we are awesome" symbolism for the East German government. I don't remember the thing rotating.)

The third monument that I remember from this trip was the Brandenberg Gate, or, rather, what we could see of it from a distance. It was pretty much right up against the Wall in East Berlin, so you couldn't actually go near it. I hadn't seen a whole lot of castles and ruins and monuments in my European adventures at that point, but I had seen enough that it struck me as remarkably unnatural that such an impressive structure would be for all appearances abandoned by the people whose ancestors had created it. I think that sight alone is what really drove home the whole concept of physically dividing a nation and a people. I distracted myself by playing with the pretty cool pen I had bought (I still have it, actually; it's a smoothed, thin piece of wood housing a cylinder of ink).

I don't remember much of anything about the drive back to West Germany, save that as soon as we were out of East Germany, I didn't so much as breathe a sigh of relief as I drank in the beautiful colors and scenery of the country that was kindly playing host to my family.

The next summer is when the Iron Curtain got rusty and riddled with holes and East Germans literally poured out of their country first into Czechoslovakia, then into Hungary, then into Austria, then into West Germany. I cheered for them and shuddered at the memory of that trip. And then it was November 9, 1989, and the Wall became a stage.

Next week I'll detail my return trip to Berlin in 1996.