So I arrived eventually in Berlin, having changed trains in Poznan first. And, the festival was already three-quarters over. And... but I did manage to meet Wolfgang Staudte and we devised a... there was a sort of a, incipient plan going that I would... I would photograph one of his movies... forthcoming movies, which was going to be, like a children's story, called Der Kleine Muck. But in the end it never happened. It proved to be too difficult.
Oh yes, I even... after coming back from Berlin, I even contemplated, briefly, I contemplated emigrating to... back to Berlin, but to Communist Berlin, as it were. This was before the Wall was built, of course. But they sent me a form, and when I saw that form, the first question was about your parents and so on, and it said, political history from birth. So I said: mmm, I wonder about this, perhaps this is not such a good idea. Anyway it was quite a thing meeting Wolfgang Staudte and we went to the offices of the film magazine and we were there till 7:30am and they got the brandy out, and we said, 'Oh, oh, not this time of the morning'. Then we realised that they were only allowed to get the brandy out for the foreign visitors. And there was a headquarters was in the Alexanderplatz, in one of those big tall buildings in the Alexanderplatz were the headquarters of the organisation of that festival. And... and everybody... they called you, friend, in German, freund. 'What... where do you want to go, friend?' But inside that building it became a bit sinister because if you missed your turning, you were going down the wrong corridor, this guy would appear and he said, 'And where do you think you're going, friend?' It became a bit menacing.
And then I travelled back to... to Berlin. I stayed... because I only arrived half way through the first week of the festival, I stayed a week beyond the end to make the most of it, and I spent all my money, which wasn't a lot in the first place. And then I made the journey back to England, very much the same journey that I'd made as a refugee in '39, armed with a loaf... a long loaf like a French baguette and a sausage, that was my food for the journey. But I also had with me the first copy of the documentary they were making about the festival. They very quickly produced a 16mm copy, which I had in my luggage. Now at the West German/East German frontier, they stopped the train and a lot of customs and immigration people came along the train, and they confiscated all the symbols of the festival. People had books with the festival... some sort of symbol, there were hats with the symbol on and scarves. They confiscated all that and when they found the film, which is about the strongest propaganda thing that exists as Lenin would tell you, they said, 'What's that?' and I told them what it was, because they'd find out sooner or later what it was. And they said, 'Okay, you can keep that', because they had no instructions regarding films. So I went through there with the greatest propaganda medium of all, I went straight through. With my sausage and my... my sausage, my loaf and my film.
