He was in Berlin on a reconnaissance designed to test the links between the new Czech Republic and potential trading partners. The reception, to which he had been bidden, was the brainchild of a group of East German industrial barons keen to lure Western businesses to set up factories in the East. Whereupon, with their abundant supply of workers, rock-bottom wages and cheap real estate, they would proceed to happily undercut their Western competitors.

Not everyone approved. ‘The East will be the workbench of the West’, one bitter ex-party leader had been reported as saying. In return, the Wessi would try to milk, or to steal (whichever was the easiest) any intelligence they could lay their hands on about the Russians.

But it was all hands to the deck for the business of re-orchestrating Europe. The cultural attachés, including the British, had cooked up a programme of activities, which were to include a trip to a bakery, a motorcycle factory and tonight’s reception. As ever, he reflected with amusement, it was a stew of competing interests and ideologies but he was not complaining.

The taxi slowed in the bunched traffic around Alexanderplatz. From what he could see, the square was rammed with the younger generation of Berliners. Restaurants and buildings blazed with light and naphtha flares ringed the ugly Fernsehturm, or TV tower.

Not for the first time, he acknowledged that the all-encompassing grey of the Prague of his upbringing was hefted into his psyche. Even though he knew Western Europe reasonably well, and liked to think he understood how it worked, the prodigality of its lighting bothered him.

A hefty percentage of the punters in the square were drunk or drugged. Mostly in a good-natured way but, as he well knew, some of these people would be poor, and if they were Ossis, possibly resentful and, perhaps, disapproving of the Wessis’ affluence, which made them dangerous.

Beer and sausage booths were doing a roaring trade. A group of singers with electric guitars belted out torch songs. They were having trouble with the power supply and the accompaniment was intermittent. No one seemed bothered. The new order had arrived and they were going at it with music and booze.

When the history was written, it would be revealed how each side had spent a percentage of the national budget on people and machines with the aim of outwitting the other – and, in the GDR, the Stasi developed into the most efficient surveillance organization ever known.

During the last days of the GDR, the Stasi tried to destroy their mountains of files and paperwork recording the decades of surveillance. The joke ran that for the most efficient surveillance system in the world, they hadn’t been very efficient. Left behind was a paper mountain, from which rose (as Petr well knew) a miasma of spite, vengeance and repression.