In Search of East Berlin (Part One: Tracing the Wall)

I went out today and tried to find the Berlin wall.  Twenty years ago this would not have been a hard thing to do.  It would literally surrounded me in its graffitied grandeur.  Moreover, were I unable to find it, ever German in the city could have the way out to me, just as every semi-automatic toting soldier on the border could have pointed my way back away from it.  Today however, the wall exists only the minds of those old enough to remember it, and I am not one such a person. 

So today I took a tour to find the Berlin wall.

The Border

Checkpoint Charlie

This was part of an on-going quest to find remants of "Ost-Berlin."  Everyday I take the U-bahn from west to east (ironically by going North) and everyday I get back on the subway to go back to "West-Berlin."  Every journey is a minor political miracle because of it is so ordinary-ness.  No longer does the U-6 travel through East German stations at which it does not stop, no longer are the only occupants of those terminals men in uniform authorized to use deadly force should anyone emerge from the train, and no longer are the stations themselves left in post-war disrepair.   Ost-Berlin is gone, and the question then falls on us latercomers to find out what it was, if it was anything at all.

I decided to start finding answers at the wall itself.

To provide some background and to debunk some popular myths, the wall was more than the (relatively) simple concrete barrier that we see pictures of people taking sledge hammers to in the late eighties.  That was the part facing West Berlin.  Beyond that was an apply named "death zone" with guard towers, soldiers, search lights, trip wires, attack dogs, and ditches large enough to stop automobiles.  Somewhere on the other side of all of that was an enormous barbed wire fence.  Designed to keep the "Ossis" in, the wall was so effective that in the eighties no more than three to five people made it across per year.  This was not for a lack of trying or creativity.  

Potsdamer Platz in the '65: Before they put up the real defenses.

Although the submarine used to get across the German boarder on the Baltic was probably the most technically complex scheme used to get to West Germany, my personal favorite involves a member of the East German government setting up a zip-line between a particularly tall East German government building and a house in West Berlin in order to successfully get his whole family across the border.  Awesome.

So I started off in Potzdamer Platz.  The border crossing has gotten easier.

Potsdamer Platz in 2009: The traffic light doesn't seem to have the same effect.

The Square used to be the central hub of the city.  However, following the destruction and subsequent division of the city two seperate city centers emerged: one around Alexanderplatz in the East and another on the Western end of the Tiergarten.  Although not fully restored to its former glory, this former death zone has been replaced by a series of ultramodern buildings and the yearly Berlin Film Festival.  Twenty years on, the wall is not just gone but has been entirely replaced.

Those portions of the wall that do remain have been preserved by an astounding combination of tourism and monuments.  Tours (which beyond ordinary walks are offered both in that venerable 2-stroke symbol of Ost-Berlin, the Trabant, as well as in hot air ballons) abound around Check Point Charlie, the recreation of the former allied checkpoint that is now populated by entirely by foreigners and reanactors.

The Four Powers go out for Coffee

Check Point Charlie

Sometimes they have trouble paying for things.

So on my first attempt to find Ost-Berlin, I happily failed.  The bulk of the wall has been recycled to form the conrete and cobblestones needed to rebuild a divided city.  What remains is largely in the hands of tourists, each of whom has taken an overpriced fraction of it home with him like some sort of relic (The urge to take a piece of the wall is inexplicable but palpable, it just seems like the appropriate thing to do).  More importantly, the few sections that remain hardly symbolize the hopelessness of the former structure.  I found all of this summed up best by the wall itself:

Picture of the Berlin Wall

Somewhere close to Kochstrasse