It was 1994, and the two halves of Germany were still cautiously feeling each other out while the media looked on. An article about the restoration of a statue of Frederick the Great in Letschin, an obscure village by the German-Polish border appeared in the Washington Post, where Charlie Bartsch noticed that the bar-owner who'd started the brouhaha about the statue bore his surname. Charlie was an orphan and had never heard of anyone else named Bartsch, so he and two of his friends decided to visit that fall.
This is, among other things, the story of that visit, told by the American journalist who, with a cab-driving friend from Berlin, wound up in the middle of an extraordinary cross-cultural exchange and unveiled a story of life under Communism, personal bravery, and not a little bit of confusion.
Part travel story, part reportage, and part memoir, The Bar at the End of the Regime captures a unique place and time as well as the cultural and social gap between the citizens of the former German Democratic Republic and the United States. It's a warm human story with a lot of humor, and shows a side of German unification you won't find in the history books.
Ed Ward is best-known as the "rock and roll historian" for Fresh Air with Terry Gross on NPR. From 1993 until 2008, he lived in Berlin, where in addition to the radio work, he contributed to the Wall Street Journal Europe as a roving cultural correspondent, and to the New York Times, as well as the Süddeutscher Zeitung and other German-language media.
advertisement