Zoo Station: Adventures in East and West Berlin

Alone among cities, Berlin is divided into capitalist and communist zones, the two systems of life and thought which dominate the metropolitan world. It is a two-faced city where every single thing is mirrored and echoed in an undeclared war of buildings, cars, clothes, flags, food, music and street-signs. Ian Walker grew up with the cold war on the television, but now he has friends both sides of the border, both sides of the argument. "Zoo Station" is what happens when a journalist goes AWOL. From his base in the Turkish ghetto of Kreuzberg (a flat he shares with runaways and exiles, and people wanted by the law) he travels on underground and overground trains back and forth across the systems. He hangs out at the British officers' mess formerly used by the Wehrmacht, takes tea in East Berlin with an old English communist. He visits the phony town called Doughboy City where the US Army holds its war games, smuggles books and records across the border for his friends in the Soviet Sector. He watches western peepshows, rides eastern roller-coasters. He chews up the cold war like a dog. He befriends escapists, ex-prisoners, guestworkers, dissidents and pop musicians. He drinks and dances till dawn in the demi-monde of West Berlin. He is in love, but slowly things fall apart. The inhabitants of his Kreuzberg flat scatter to all corners of the earth. "Zoo Station" is an odyssey through the two Berlins, through private and public worlds, a collage of history and journalism, and polemic, facts and jokes, and the songs playing in the background.