7.9/The Lived Worlds/The Body in the City

West Berlin on the Phone: The Transatlantic Call

The Line

West Berlin local numbers ran five to seven digits, which made the full dialed string from New York roughly twelve to fourteen digits.¹ On a touch-tone phone the string took three to five seconds to enter. On a rotary phone — a minority of New York apartments by 1989, but not rare in the older rent-stabilized units still carrying legacy Bell equipment — each digit meant a physical rotation of the dial and its return against the spring at ten pulses a second, and the full number took twenty to thirty seconds to complete.² The routing at the far end was identical either way; the exchange accepted pulse or tone signaling and converted both. The only thing the caller’s choice of instrument changed was how long the dialing hand was occupied.

What happened after the last digit depended on hardware laid across the ocean floor. TAT-8, the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, had gone into service in December 1988 — nearly a year before the Wall opened.³ Built by a consortium led by AT&T with British Telecom and France Télécom at a cost of $335 million, it carried 40,000 simultaneous telephone circuits on strands of glass, ten times the traffic of the last copper cable, and the planners who had estimated it would take a decade to fill were wrong by eight and a half years: it reached capacity in eighteen months. A voice leaving a Manhattan apartment traveled to an AT&T switching center, then some seventy-five miles south to the cable landing station at Tuckerton, New Jersey, then under the Atlantic to a landfall in Cornwall or Brittany, then overland through the European network to the West Berlin exchange. Older copper cable and Intelsat satellites still carried the overflow. The caller had no say in the path; the switching equipment assigned each call to whatever circuit was free.

The path decided the sound. A call routed through a geostationary satellite went up to an object parked 35,786 kilometers above the equator and back down, and the trip imposed roughly half a second of round-trip delay — long enough that the two parties talked over each other until they learned to leave gaps, each waiting to be sure the other had stopped.⁴ Satellite calls carried a faint hiss, an echo the suppression circuits never fully caught, and the disorienting return of one’s own voice a beat late. A call routed through TAT-8 arrived with well under a fifth of a second of delay and almost none of that texture — clean, close, nearly indistinguishable from a call across town. By late 1989 the growing fiber capacity meant most calls came through clear, but any given call might still be handed to a satellite, and the person lifting the handset could not know in advance which ocean they would get.

There was one more signal the caller heard before any voice, and it announced the crossing. An American phone returns a ring-back tone built from two pitches, 440 and 480 hertz together, sounding two seconds and resting four.⁵ Once the connection reached the West Berlin exchange, what came down the line instead was the German Freizeichen: a single 425-hertz tone, one second on and four seconds of silence, repeating — lower, purer, more clipped than the American double tone, a short clean note and then a long wait. The tone was the confirmation that the dialed string had resolved somewhere on the far side of the ocean and that a telephone was ringing in a room in Europe. Everything up to that point was apparatus. What answered was a person.

The Voice

The person who answered in a West Berlin apartment carried, in the first syllable, a set of facts about class and generation. An educated Berliner born in the 1920s or 1930s — someone who had lived in the city through the war, the rubble years, the blockade, and the Wall — spoke Hochdeutsch in public and professional life almost as a matter of course. By 1989, Berlinerisch, the city’s own dialect, had settled into a sociolect rather than a regional accent: it marked the working class, and the educated middle class had spent the Cold War decades of West Berlin’s subsidized prosperity training it out of their speech to compete for professional work.⁶ The dialect had become a thing one dropped to sound schooled.

It never dropped completely. Under emotion the trained-down Hochdeutsch thinned and the Berlin underneath came through, feature by feature, in a documented order — the palatal ich hardening first into the velar ick that even careful speakers failed to suppress, then the dental stops, the softened g, the flattened vowels, the swallowed word-endings, until the speech had got faster and blunter and altogether more Berlin. The order was not arbitrary: emotional arousal returns a speaker to the earliest, most embedded patterns, and for a man of this generation those were the sounds of a working-class childhood the professional years had papered over.

The dialect carried an attitude with it, the quality Berliners call the Schnauze — cheeky, direct, quick, spoken fast with the words half-chewed, unwilling to turn sentimental even under feeling. Its most cited grammatical fingerprint was the Akkudativ, the city’s collapse of the accusative and dative into a single case, which produced ick liebe dir where standard German requires ich liebe dich. An educated speaker trained that construction out of professional speech first and lost it last, and it surfaced, when it surfaced, in the moments least available to control.

What such a man would not say to his own child was Ich liebe dich. In German that sentence belonged almost entirely to romantic love; spoken by a parent to a grown daughter it landed wrong to a native ear, like a line mistranslated from an American script. The word for the other love, the durable familial kind, was Ich hab’ dich lieb — literally I have you dear — and in the Berlin mouth, with the case-merger doing its work, it comes out Ick hab dir lieb. For a generation of men raised on the postwar instruction to work hard and not complain, even that was close to the edge of what could be said, and love more often traveled by other means: a warning to take care of oneself, an understatement, the plain warmth left audible in the voice once the formal register had cracked. The endearments that fit the relationship were mein Kind, Kindchen, mein Schatz — the last of these not romantic in family use but the ordinary German word of tenderness, arriving in Berlin as meen Schatz — and, when a father saw the grown daughter as the child she had once been, meine Kleine, in Berlin meene Kleene.

November 9

On the night of November 9 and into November 10, the international circuits to Berlin filled. Everyone with a reason to call was calling at once, in both directions across the Atlantic, and connection times that took only seconds on an ordinary evening stretched as the switching equipment queued for a free path. A New Yorker with family in West Berlin dialed the twelve or fourteen digits, waited through the processing clicks, and got either the fast busy of a saturated network or, eventually, the single low German tone and then a voice.

The voice, that night, was likely to be doing the thing the dialect does under pressure. The word attached to that night in German memory was Wahnsinn — madness, the unbelievable — and the register of a man of that generation, watching from a Berlin window as people walked across a line that had been lethal the day before, ran to understatement even so: Na endlich, wa? — well, finally, right? — the emotion carried by the Berlin surfacing in the grammar rather than by any large declaration. The tenderness of that generation went no further than the two most exposed words of such an exchange, the case-merger intact in both: Pass uff dir uff, meen Schatz. Ick hab dir lieb. Take care of yourself, my treasure. I love you.

The line and the voice reached the same handset from opposite kinds of order. The line was the most controlled object in the exchange — glass drawn to a tolerance, a signal timed to the millisecond, a tone specified to the hertz, a border encoded cleanly in a pair of country codes. The thing it carried was the least controlled: a man’s public German coming apart into the dialect of his childhood at the exact moment the city of that childhood stopped being two cities. Within a few years the encoded border went too — the 37 code retired as the eastern network was folded into the Federal Republic’s, the two Berlins collapsed into a single numbering plan, a call across the old line no different from a call across the street. The cable had been engineered to lose nothing. What it delivered, faithfully, was a voice in the act of giving itself away.