Like many, I have watched with a mixture of concern and powerlessness at political changes around the world that have brought fear and oppression on people who once enjoyed freedom of expression. The recent events in Hong Kong have been particularly difficult to watch, given the many academic colleagues I have had over the years currently living there but whose future is now far from certain. Since, in the UK, we have little to fear from the state curtailing our freedom of speech, it can be difficult at times to fully empathise with those living under such strict regimes. However, for me, an incident I experienced over 30 years ago, helps serve as a permanent reminder.
As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, I was invited to present my research at an international conference in Berlin. And being young and naïve, it occurred to me how interesting it might be to visit East Berlin to experience, at first hand, life under communist rule. Having persuaded a colleague to accompany me, we made the perilous crossing through Checkpoint Charlie with armed guards watching our every move and began to explore a city congenitally devoid of colour: every car was painted the same shade of grey. But it was the shortage of shops selling food that finally led us to a hotel with a restaurant on the ground floor. Since there was no space available, a queue had formed that stretched some way down the street. We waited obediently in line for half an hour before eventually taking our seats and ordering a meal that tasted as grey as it looked. But it was something else that made the experience truly unique: despite spending an hour in the presence of more than a hundred people, not a single word was spoken. Everything was conducted in silence: choices were made by pointing at the menu and the intention to pay by raising an arm.
Although the experience remains a powerful illustration of the insidious impact that fear has on human interactions, it also illustrates the resilience of human nature and how even the most oppressive of regimes is ultimately transient. Only three months after returning from Berlin, I watched transfixed, along with the rest of the world, as the Berlin Wall fell, a symbol of oppression systematically dismantled by those it had sought to silence. I recently visited Berlin again under rather different circumstances and set out to find the hotel. The restaurant was as full as it had been 30 years previously, but now it was bursting with colour and drowning in a cacophony of friendly banter.