At the end of our street in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, lies sprawling Mauerpark or ‘Wall Park’, which the Berlin Wall once ran through. These days a buzzy flea market is held in Mauerpark every Sunday. In keeping with this year’s theme of digging deeper and learning about the local neighbourhoods we’re settling into for two weeks at a time, we decided to do a guided walk along the Berlin Wall.
Several beautiful photography books in our Prenzlauer Berg apartment rental comparing life before the Berlin Wall and after the Berlin Wall had us intrigued. We knew the history of the Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) but we wanted to learn more about the impact of the Berlin Wall on residents of the neighbourhoods that The Wall went through, and Berliners more generally.
We’d visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, now called the Mauer Museum or Wall Museum, on our first trip to Berlin many years ago. But at the time the Museum told the story of the Berlin Wall predominantly from the West Berlin perspective. This time we’re staying in East Berlin.
We decided to sign up for a Walking the Wall guided tour with Context docent Julian Smith-Newman, who grew up in Berlin and recently returned to live in the city again. We meet at the Berlin Wall Memorial and Berlin Wall Documentation Centre on Bernauer Strasse, where Julian begins the story of the Berlin Wall at the beginning.
A Walk Along the Berlin Wall to Learn About a City Divided into East and West
At the end of World War II, pre-war West Germany was divided into four occupation zones controlled by the Allied powers, the USA, UK, France, and Soviet Union, while Berlin was similarly divided, despite the German capital being well and truly located in the Soviet zone.
It was an agreement that was doomed from the start. The Soviets weren’t interested in democracy and economic reform. If anything, Josef Stalin envisaged a united Germany within the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc that included Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet-backed East German government didn’t agree with the Allies’ reconstruction plans, so the UK, France and USA combined the non-Soviet zones into one Allied-administered zone. The Soviets decided to go a step further.
The Berlin Wall Goes Up
Berliners got wind of the East German government’s plans to erect a wall between the East Berlin and West Berlin zones. On Saturday 13 August 1961, the night the ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart’, as the East German government called it, was erected, some 3,000 people fled East Berlin for West Berlin.
It’s thought another 30,000 East Berliners were planning to leave for West Berlin the next day, but were prevented from doing so when the wall went up that night.
The first incarnation of the Berlin Wall was 1.5 metres tall, topped with barbed wire, and ran 97 miles around Berlin’s western sectors and 27 miles directly through the city centre.
It wasn’t until 1965 that the fully-fledged Berlin Wall took the form that Julian points out from where we stand on the rooftop of the Documentation Centre.
From the roof we can see two parallel concrete walls, a watchtower, and, in between, a patrol road running by the infamous, desolate ‘death strip’ that quickly came to represent the immense divide, both physical and ideological, between East and West.
When the Wall went up that Saturday night in 1961, it ended all freedom of movement between East Berlin and West Berlin, artificially separating the city. It also split up families, neighbours and friends for more than a quarter of a century, until the Berlin Wall finally came down on 9 November 1989.
Inside the Documentation Centre we watched clips of dramatic black and white archival footage of East Berliners escaping through windows of buildings that formed the Eastern barrier, jumping out of apartment windows onto firemen’s trampolines into West Germany below. Julian points out what remains of those buildings across the road.
We leave the Documentation Centre and cross the road to the park to see several memorials, including a monument to those who died attempting to escape, a reminder of the bodies that were removed from the cemetery behind to make way for the wall, and some artworks erected in remembrance.
Ghost Stations
We cross the road to visit the ‘Ghost Station’ of Nordbahnhof, one of a number of underground train stations that were closed to the public at the time. Because Berlin’s train network spanned East Berlin and West Berlin, some U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines fell within one half of Berlin.
Other train lines were divided, running only to the East-West border and back, while others continued to be open to West Berliners, but didn’t stop at East Berlin stations, which were blocked off to the public and heavily guarded. These became known as Ghost Stations.
We stroll along the old route of the Berlin Wall to get a sense of the scale and nature of the division, stopping to see artworks along the way. Julian describes how guards faced outwards to appear as if they were protecting the East Berliners from West Berliners, but the reality was that they were keeping the people in.
Our three-hour walk tracing parts of the route of the old Berlin Wall takes in more monuments and art works and another preserved section of the Wall in the Prussian Cemetery.
As we stroll along the icy paths, Julian helps me to understand the complex social, cultural and political history of the concrete barrier, and the steps taken to preserve its history and meaning since the wall was pulled down in 1989.
The Wall Comes Down But How Many Remember
We vividly remember the images of the fall of the Berlin Wall on television, but I imagine if you were born in the 1990s or later, it would be very easy to visit Berlin these days not knowing anything about the Wall, and not taking an interest in any remnants of the Wall or memorials to the Wall.
I wonder how many young Berliners take an interest in their ‘recent’ history, how many know what the monuments in the parks mean, what Ghost Stations were…
I’ve detected differences and tensions between East Berlin and West Berlin and their residents on this trip that I’d never noticed or considered on previous trips. I wonder if the causes can be traced back to the post-war divisions created by the Berlin Wall.
The Wall has well and truly gone, but for those who grew up in the 70s, 80s and 90s, who only knew what it was like to live in a city divided, what does it mean to live in Berlin now? Did the differences that were allowed to form in the 30+ years of the life of the Berlin Wall disintegrate overnight when the Wall came down? I’m not so sure.
