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AM I EUROPEAN OR JUST CONF USED? TEXT
G AV I N H E R I L H Y
When Mark Reeder arrived in Berlin from Manchester on a dreary night in 1978, he might as well have landed on another planet. Aged 20 and in Berlin as a representative for Factory Records - the label that gave the world Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays - life was by no means easy. Berlin was a crazy place, split down the middle by a wall and full of draft dodgers, artists, crazies, gay men and grannies. “The corner bar on my street was owned by a big burly transvestite,” he recounts, “outside, a fat, one-legged hooker sat daily on one of those boxes that control the traffic lights.” His f lat had no telephone but luckily was opposite the ‘Fernmeldeamt’ (the main telephone exchange of west Berlin) in Schöneberg. “Not everyone had a telephone in their homes back then, we all just accepted the normal channels of communication: phone, letters or if it was urgent, a telegram.” A letter to the UK would take almost a week to arrive, and a reply maybe two more. Getting from Manchester to Berlin by train or car took a minimum of 24 hours, or three hours by aeroplane. Phoning was all a question of being able to collect enough coins for the phonebox, which only took 10 pfennig
pieces (about five eurocents) or one mark coins (50 eurocents) for a phone call to the UK that could cost up to 10 marks.“If you were unlucky,” says Mark “you would get cut off mid-sentence, which could drive you to the brink of despair.” Fast forward to the Berlin of 21st century Europe. Like Mark was back in 1978, I’m a recent arrival in Berlin except this time it doesn’t feel like I’ve landed on the dark side of the moon. A lot has changed since the seventies. Sure I don’t use a hover board to go to the shops, and teleporting home after a morning at the Panorama Bar is still annoyingly some way off, but it’s a fact of life that most of my wildest sci-fi dreams as a child have come true. I communicate with the world via a handheld tablet that allows me to send emails, store music, take pictures, record videos or pull down googled addresses from the cloud of information that makes up the Internet that is now as much a part of the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Speaking to my friends is done face to face through a computer screen thanks to the wonders of Skype or iChat.