Twenty Years On

by David Gourley

For someone like me, who is a student of history with an interest in the Cold War, Berlin has to be an interesting place. I was fascinated by the very idea of an island of democracy a hundred miles or so behind the Iron Curtain. I never got to go there during the Cold War era and, prior to 2009, had only passed through it by train. We finally made it in the year in which the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall was later to be commemorated. Berlin, more than anywhere else, symbolized the Cold War. Its beginning, middle and end were marked by events in this city. The Soviet blockade in 1948, effectively an attempt to starve West Berlin into submission, was thwarted by the Western airlift. Soon afterwards, the rival Cold War alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, came into being. Soviet pressure on West Berlin continued on and off through the fifties. Then, in 1961, the Wall was erected. Monstrous though this construction was, it represented a kind of defeat for the Soviet Union and its East German allies, for it was an acceptance that they’d have to content themselves with just eight of the Berlin districts and would never get their hands on the other twelve. In 1989 the Wall came down. Some might object that all this is in the past and that Berlin, once more the capital of an undivided county, has a vibrant present and future. That is true, but the student of history is allowed to live in the past sometimes. 

The division of Berlin was the result of an agreement between the Allies during WW2. Defeated Germany, it was decided, would be divided into British, American and Soviet zones; Berlin, though embedded in the Soviet zone, was to be likewise divided. Later a French zone was, in both cases, carved out of the British and American zones. At the end of the War, the entire city of Berlin was liberated by the Red Army but much of what was to become the GDR (German Democratic Republic – West Germans invariably prefixed the word sogennante or ‘so-called’), including its largest undivided city, Leipzig, was liberated by the Americans. A few weeks later the American forces withdrew to the agreed interzonal boundary and the Russians none too happily allowed the western powers to occupy their sectors of Berlin. The assumption at the time was that allied occupation of Berlin would be short term and that the city would remain a single entity.

Although some two-thirds of Berliners found themselves in the West, the heart of the city, the Mitte District, was in the Soviet zone. A comparable situation in London would have seen the Cities of London and Westminster in the East, whilst Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham would have formed the centre of gravity in the West. Some suburbs e.g. Uxbridge, Hounslow and Richmond would have been in the West, others eg Greenwich, Bexley and Ilford in the East, and the dividing line would have run through areas north and south of the centre. To get to cities in ‘West Britain’, such as Birmingham or Cardiff, the West Londoner would have had to pass through, or fly over, the territory of ‘East Britain’.



We had a most enjoyable three night stay in Berlin, the one unsatisfactory aspect being the very late flight, meaning we arrived at the city’s Schönefeld airport at around 11.00pm. We were met by our guide Keith, a Briton living in Berlin who was excellent, being affable and approachable as well as very knowledgeable. He informed us, as we left the airport, that we were not yet in Berlin. Schönefeld, formerly the airport for East Berlin, lies beyond the city boundaries, being located in the Land of Brandenburg. We soon crossed into the city, its boundary marked by a sign showing a bear, this being the symbol of Berlin, and also of another European capital, Berne. Our hotel was in Charlottenburg District, in the heart of former West Berlin and fairly close to its main thoroughfare, the Kurfurstendamm. “We feel it worth mentioning,” stated our tour company in its literature, “That our hotel is in the former Western part of the city, where the infrastructure is still superior to the East.”

Keith informed us when we crossed from East into West Berlin, thus entering Rudow, which was as far east as one could go and still be in the West. Later on he told us when we were crossing from the American into the British sector, Charlottenburg being in the latter. We drove past Tempelhof Airport, which had played a vital role in the Airlift. Because of this many regret the fact that it has recently been closed, as the authorities have designated Schönefeld as the city’s airport, so the other main airport in the west, Tegel, will also be closing shortly. Ironically it was a long-held objective of the GDR to make Schönefeld the only airport and thus remove the possibility of fleeing citizens reaching West Germany by air. The Airlift almost overnight gave the city a much needed image makeover: from having been the intended capital of the Thousand Year Reich (though it was never before 1933 a Nazi stronghold) it now became a symbol of freedom.

Our itinerary was well put together, a mix of excursions and time to look around by ourselves. On the first of our two full days we had a city tour that took in either side of the Wall. This now exists in only three places and we were to visit all three. We crossed into the East at Checkpoint Charlie. The names of the Cold War checkpoints were derived from the first three letters of the Morse Code; the following day we got a fleeting glimpse of what had been Checkpoint Bravo, on the border between West Berlin and the GDR, whilst Checkpoint Alpha was at Helmstedt on the border between the two Germanies.

Checkpoint Charlie is one of the places where the Wall still exists. It split in two Friedrichstrasse, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. Nowadays, of course, one simply strolls from one side to the other, but there is still a sign informing one that one is about to leave the American Sector. The Wall serves as an extensive exhibition area setting out its history. Wanting more time to look at this, and also wishing to visit the Cold War Museum, we headed back to Checkpoint Charlie during our free time in the afternoon.

We moved on into the historic Mitte District which has many handsome buildings and fine squares and thoroughfares, including Unter den Linden (meaning ‘under the lime trees’) which runs eastwards from the Brandenburg Gate. Its half of Friedrichstrasse now has many smart shops including an outpost of the celebrated Parisian store, Galeries Lafayette. We paused at Humboldt Univesity, which straddles Unter den Linden. Here we saw the memorial which marks the spot where the Nazis did their book-burning soon after they assumed power. The University had been founded by Frederick the Great and Keith was sure that he would have been turning in his grave when the books were burned. Both Keith and our local guide the next day were keen to stress that Frederick was a very cultured man, and to dispel the image of Prussia as a militaristic and aggressive state. That is entirely fair, though it is true too that, by seizing Silesia from the Austrians, Frederick set in train the process that ultimately led to Germany being unified under Hohenzollern rather than Habsburg leadership, with Berlin therefore as its capital rather than Vienna. The Communists at first disowned him and pulled down his statue in Unter den Linden. Later, having decided it would be to their advantage to show themselves more in tune with the country’s past greatness, they re-erected it. 

Continuing further east we came to the District of Friedrichshain, sometimes described as up and coming. It might be ‘coming’ but it did not look very ‘up’. We stopped here to look at the longest remaining section of the Wall, the East Side Gallery. With its 100-plus paintings it is the largest open air gallery in the world. The boundary in this area with West Berlin was formed by the River Spree, with the Wall running along its northern bank. Though we were viewing it from the former East, it looks more like the Wall used to look like from the West, from where the wire and fortifications, that made escape well-nigh impossible, were hidden from view. Apparently the authorities were mindful that visiting dignitaries from abroad passed this stretch of the Wall on their drive in from Schönefeld Airport and they wanted to present it in sanitized form.

 We drove back into the centre down Karl-Marx-Allee. It’s curious that this name persists in post-unification Berlin: elsewhere in the GDR the town of Karl Marx Stadt swiftly reverted to its old name, Chemnitz. The street was for a while known as Stalinallee, the name being changed when, with no great enthusiasm and under pressure from Khrushchev’s Moscow, the GDR authorities renounced Uncle Joe. Classic Soviet-style architecture lines this street. We found this interesting and in a way impressive (the best example we have seen is in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhiye, along the appropriately named Lenin Prospekt). But Keith told us that visitors from the former Eastern bloc often complain: “Why are you bringing us here? We can see buildings like this back home.”

The main centre of gravity in East Berlin was Alexanderplatz. Here is the TV Tower, clearly visible from the other side of the Wall. East Berliners could ascend it and thus look into the west; they had to be content with that since they could not of course actually go there. A curious phenomenon, not at all pleasing to the Communist authorities, is that the sun makes the shape of a cross in the circular viewing area near the top of the tower. This was known to East Berliners as the “Pope’s revenge”.

From here our tour took us back into the west and through the Tiergarten, the huge park that abutted the Wall. Berlin is a very green city; I used to think that living in West Berlin must be rather claustrophobic given the inability to go to surrounding areas but within its boundaries were many woods and lakes, giving almost a feel of being in the country. Not long before, Barack Obama, at that time still a candidate for the presidency, had given a stirring speech in the Tiergarten. This brought to mind a still more celebrated presidential speech in Berlin, a couple of years after the Wall went up, when President Kennedy proclaimed: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. The venue for this was elsewhere i.e. the square outside Rathaus Schöneberg, the seat of West Berlin’s city government. The square has ever since been known as Kennedyplatz. 

We finished our tour at the Reichstag building, our time now being our own. There was a lengthy queue to get inside this impressive new addition to the Berlin landscape but the wait was worthwhile for there are fine views from the top. We were led to understand that dining in the rooftop restaurant would not be possible since it was always fully booked. Cathy is not one to shy away from such a challenge: we had a good lunch there. The building is just on the western side of the Wall and across the road are memorials to its victims, those who died trying to get across. Poignantly the very last had died in 1989; had he waited a few more months, he could have walked across without let or hindrance. But even at the start of 1989 no-one, not even the experts, foresaw that, by the end of the year, the Wall would have fallen and that Germany would be on the path to reunification. As late as September the Communist leadership celebrated the 40th anniversary of the GDR, no doubt thinking that the next 40 years were about to commence. It survived for not much longer than forty weeks!

We re-entered the East though the Brandenburg Gate. Once the symbol of the city’s division, it nowadays symbolizes its unity. A bit beyond is the historic Adlon Hotel. Marooned a few hundred yards the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, it was demolished after WW2 but was rebuilt after the Wall fell and is once again a world-class hotel. We diverted through the moving Holocaust Memorial, which comprises numerous concrete slabs, each of a different size to mark the fact that the victims, so often thought of en masse, were individuals, and thus of differing height. We reached Friedrichstrasse and passed through Checkpoint Charlie. Here we spent some time in the Museum or Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. This is a fascinating, if somewhat idiosyncratic, establishment and we spent quite some time there. It is just inside the former West, its windows looking out into the East, and it opened not long after the Wall went up.

We were stopped at one point by a young German couple who asked us if we knew what “all this” was about. We assumed that they were being solicitous for us, albeit unnecessarily since everything is translated into English. But no, they didn’t understand what it was all about so I explained to them why the Wall was built. It seemed a bit bizarre to be doing this but, thinking about it, it was perhaps not so strange. Unless one is at least in one’s mid twenties one can have no memory of the Cold War era and for young people, even in Germany, it must seem rather irrelevant. Sadly, I am not only old enough to remember the Wall coming down, I can also remember it going up! Using the metro, or here the U-bahn, can in an overseas city be something of an initiative test. It was just that here: there were no staff but, with the help of a kindly passerby, we managed to pass the test and made it back to our hotel.

Our included tour the next day was to Potsdam, just southwest of the city and formerly in the GDR. Our free time in the morning was spent close to base, wandering along the Kurfurstendamm. Since unification this former showcase of the West is no longer at the centre of Berlin life but it’s an elegant shopping street still. We spent a bit of time in the Kaiser Wilhelm Kirche. It was bombed during the War and has never been rebuilt, the structure being used for an interesting and rather moving exhibition. There are close ties with Coventry Cathedral. Next door is the new church which, from the outside, looks like a characterless modern building. All changes as one goes inside and sees the stunning stained glass inlays that are all around. We continued to the end of Kurfurstendamm and a bit beyond, getting as far as Ka-de-We, the well-known department store. It translates as store of the west but this has nothing do with the fact that it was in West Berlin; it was known as that long before, the name denoting its location west of the centre.

Heading out towards Potsdam I noticed that there was a Lewishamstrasse. I ascertained later that Charlottenburg is twinned with the South London Borough, which does not however reciprocate with any street name. The drive took down us the fast road that in the old days took one to Checkpoint Bravo. The Germans are known for their love of fast driving and even now no government dares to impose a speed limit on the Autobahnen. Keith recounted how this was just about the only stretch of road on which West Berliners could indulge this love of speed, before juddering to a halt at the Checkpoint. We continued through Wannsee in the far southwest of the city, which, with its lakes and woods, was at weekends a mecca for West Berliners. To get back into the former GDR, we crossed by foot the Glienicke Bridge, famous in Cold War times for its spy swaps, including the downed American U2 pilot, Gary Powers. It was a glorious day and it was hard to believe, in these idyllic lakeside surrounds, that the Iron Curtain had once run through here.

Potsdam starts just beyond, its trams coming up almost to the border. In Berlin, trams are regarded as rather an eastern thing. West Berlin didn’t have them. There is still an extensive network in the East with one or two routes now crossing the former divide. Main purpose of this trip was to visit Frederick the Great’s Sans Souci palace, which is surrounded by beautiful gardens. Potsdam, like Yalta in the Crimea, was the site of a meeting between the wartime allies that effectively sealed the postwar division of Europe between East and West. The venue was a different palace, Cecilienhof. Having visited its Yalta counterpart, Livadia Palace, during our Ukraine trip, I was a bit sorry not to get to Cecilienhof.

Our local guide was a charming lady of about fifty. We asked her about life in the GDR. We were not sure whether this was the right thing to do, as maybe a lot of its former citizens prefer to think in the present tense. But she was happy to chat to us about it. She said that, living in Potsdam, she was very conscious of the border since it was so near; that had not been the case when she’d lived much further away from it, in the southern part of the GDR. She recalled that, a few months before the Wall fell, she and he husband had gone for a stroll and realized that they’d got very near to the border; fearing they might be shot they swiftly retreated. She was positive about the changes since reunification but conceded that many people weren’t. Their lives might have been drab and lacking in the freedoms taken for granted in the west but they had job security and reasonable health and welfare provision. Hence the phenomenon of Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the GDR days, brilliantly brought to life in the film Goodbye Lenin. There was time for a look round the attractive centre of Potsdam, where some of the architecture is Dutch-influenced.

We were going home the next day but, since our flight was not until late afternoon, there was more time to explore, this time under our own steam. We used this time to visit the third part of the Wall that is still standing, namely at Bernauerstrasse, which lies to the north of the city centre. To get there we used the U-bahn. One outcome of the Wall being built was the physical separation, between the two parts of the city, of the U-bahn and also of the overhead railway, the S-bahn. A curiosity, though, was that two lines continued to run between the northern and southern parts of West Berlin, passing en route beneath Eastern territory. The trains still stopped at the intermediate stations but, with one exception, these were ghost stations: no-one could get on or off. The exception was Freidrichstrasse Station, where westerners – but not of course easterners – could transfer between the two subway systems.

Getting to Bernauerstrasse involved using two lines. The first of these, U5, had been wholly in the West, apart from the very end station, which stood isolated and unused in the East for 28 years. The second, U8, had been one of the two running from north to south via the East. The interchange station, Kottbuser Tor had been in the West and so too was Moritzplatz, the next station going north. From then on we were stopping at the former ghost stations, which included Bernauerstrasse itself. One re-entered the West at Voltastrasse, one stop further on. 

The border between East and West Berlin followed the boundaries of the city’s districts, as drawn in 1920 when there was a major local government reorganization. Bernauerstrasse itself, and the apartments on its northern side, were in the District of Wedding and thus in the West. The apartments on the southern side were in Communist Mitte. But the people either side regarded themselves as a single community, who worshipped at the Church of Reconciliation, just inside Mitte; it mattered little in their day-to-day lives that they lived in different districts, or even, after WW2, under different political systems for, until the Wall went up, one could go back and forth between the two Berlins with no let or hindrance. At first the Communist authorities could not build the Wall in this area, for the apartments on the south side of the road were in the way. They bricked up the entrances straight away but, for a short while, one could still escape into the West by jumping from the upstairs windows. Hence some of the most dramatic scenes after the Wall went up. With the help of western onlookers and the fire brigade, most escapees landed safely, but a few fell to their death. One particularly dramatic photo shows a 77 year old lady: as she tries to escape, the top part of her body is being gripped by an East German Vopo (or policeman) whilst her feet are held by someone in the West. The forces of gravity won out and she made it safely into the West. In due course the apartments were demolished and the Wall went up. In 1985 the authorities blew up the Church of Reconciliation, a scene captured by camera by a western onlooker.

Wedding’s border with the East was to be the scene of far happier pictures 28 years later, for it was here, at the Bornholmer Strasse crossing point (one of the seven authorized border crossings in the city) that the Wall was first breached. Among the many who crossed it on that historic evening in November 1989 was a Mrs Merkel, a young East German scientist. I don’t suppose it for one moment occurred to her that a consequence of the evening’s events was that she’d one day be Chancellor of a United Germany! Twenty years on she repeated the walk, this time in the company of other world leaders, as part of the anniversary celebrations. At first we stayed on the southern – in political terms the eastern – side of Bernauerstrasse where we visited the Chapel of Reconciliation, located on the land of the demolished Church. We then inspected the Wall, this being the only place where one can still see a section of the border fortifications with all the various installations and barriers: the Hinterland and border walls (inner and outer walls), ‘no man's land’, sentry path, and floodlights. No jumping from windows was necessary to get to the other, or Western, side of the street. We simply strolled across. Here we visited the Berlin Wall Documentation Centre, a feature of which is a tower which one can ascend for an aerial view of the Wall. The Centre is still work in progress and is to be considerably expanded in the next few years. Here there is also the Berlin Wall Memorial. As originally planned, it was simply going to mark the division of the city, but public pressure saw to it that it also remembers ‘the victims of communist tyranny.’ It had been a moving visit.


First published in VISA 89 (Feb 2010)