No boss sitting over me. My own little fiefdom. A fiefdom, of course, was precisely what it was intended to be: technically subservient to Reuters Bonn, the large office which covered the economic superpower that West Germany had become. It housed dozens of native staff who ran the German-language news and economics service. There was also an office in West Berlin, with two West German staff. But for reasons both political and historical the East Berlin office was staffed from London, by a Briton. The main reason for this was that Berlin had in theory remained under the control of the victorious World War II Allies. This meant that when Reuters, still emerging from its role in the British wartime propaganda set-up, opened a separate office in the Soviet sector in the 1950s, (in itself a controversial move as it implied recognition of the division of Germany that had already de facto occurred) no one ever suggested the correspondent should be anything other than one of the ‘Allies’.
