Features

Off the wall

30 Jun 2009 by Sara Turner

To mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Oliver Bennett gets off the beaten track to retrace its history.

Everywhere you look in Berlin are reminders of the great 20th-century conflicts it has been at the heart of, from the Nazi regime to the Communist era. Look close enough and you’ll still see bullet holes in some of the grand old buildings. The tourists love it. Last year, the city attracted a record 7.9 million visitors, many of whom would have seen the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, and at least one of the remaining segments of the Berlin Wall.

This November is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the city is marking it with events throughout the year. The Cold War is a particular draw for visitors – especially the British. Barbara Geier, press officer for the German National Tourist Office, says: “They’re obsessed. Much more so than us Germans.”

On previous visits to the city I’ve seen the Checkpoint Charlie Museum on Friedrichstrasse, where tat-sellers flog knock-off Red Army hats, and driven a Trabant, the Communist two- stroke motor. They’re both great fun, but tour guide Adam Froneus describes them as “like the GDR [the German Democratic Republic] gone Disneyland. Horrible and sensational.”

So on this trip, I want to get off the beaten track. At a prearranged site (no, I can’t tell you where) I meet Richard Campbell, an American who used to work for the US government in Berlin. As he had been here when the border was created overnight in August 1961, he is a good companion with whom to see some Cold War sites.

At Potsdamer Platz, the glossy, corporate heart of reunified Berlin, we see a red information booth commemorating the fall of the wall. New signs, a range of attractions and events, and a 160km “Berlin Wall trail” – the Cold War is certainly big business. “It attracts people, no doubt about it,” Campbell says. I ask if is it because we’ve lived through that history. “Perhaps,” he nods, with practised non-commitment.

We drive past Berlin’s major sights to reach the poignant seven white crosses near the Reichstag that commemorate those who died trying to cross the border between East and West (pictured above right). We then see a basalt memorial for one of the first victims of the Wall guards – 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who was shot when he tried to escape in 1962 and bled to death where he fell. Somehow, the smaller memorials catapult one into the human stories behind the escape attempts.

By the River Spree, we stop at the Parliament of Trees, a modest remembrance park with a section of wall painted by artist Ben Wagin. It’s thought 250 people died trying to escape, and Campbell saw some of them at first hand. “I remember these two guys swimming to the West,” he says. “One made it, the other didn’t.”

The wall, Campbell explains, was in fact two barriers containing a sinister no-man’s land in the middle known as the “death strip”. As we walk across the waste ground, Campbell tells me about his time working in intelligence, and recalls the system whereby escapees from the East went back as spies. “How did that work – how were they persuaded to do it?” I ask. Campbell replies: “That’s still classified.”

We dine at the Schneeweiss in Friedrichshain, chosen for its snow-white interior. Berlin has a highly inventive hotel and restaurant culture, partly because the dashed industrial expectations following reunification meant there was cheap space for creative, experimental businesses.

Another example of this entrepreneurial spirit is the Video Bustour, a simple idea whereby a tour bus stops at historic sites around the city and shows the passengers relevant archive footage. I meet guide Froneus at Unter den Linden and clamber on board. We stop at a watchtower by the River Spree, where Gunter Liftin was killed trying to escape. It’s now a small memorial looked after by his brother, and Froneus is relieved he isn’t in. “Nice guy,” he says, “but he’ll keep you there talking about how terrible Communism was all day.”

Further on, the bus makes its way along the Bernauerstrasse, a long, dreary street in Mitte. It’s here that the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Documentation Centre and the Chapel of Reconciliation reside. You can also climb an observation tower to get a view of the best-preserved segment of wall.

Back on the bus, we watch footage of people in this very street leaping from their houses next to the wall on the East to the pavements below in the West. Froneus explains that the authorities bricked up the windows and demolished the top floors then built another wall and put mines in the death strip to make sure no one could get across.

We drive on to the East Side Gallery at Muhlenstrasse, in the gentrified inner suburb of Friedrichshain. Here is the longest cohesive section of the wall – the graffiti-covered concrete that symbolises Berlin to many people. But, as Froneus points out, the wall extended way out of town. In fact, the border was so well controlled that some East Germans went to Bulgaria to try to escape into Greece.

I want to see the wall outside the city, and we drive half an hour to Potsdam, a historic town well known for its role in the Second World War carve-up, when it was cut off from the West. The capital city of the German federal state of Brandenburg, it is the only town in the GDR to have experienced population growth after reunification.

In the 18th-century Dutch quarter, I gaze into tourist shops with cute green shutters. A quaint and prosperous place, it seems sheer misfortune that Potsdam ended up on the wrong side of the wall, particularly as it was close to the centre of the film industry at Babelsberg, and is surrounded by lovely forests and lakes – Potsdam boasts the only Aldi supermarket you can get to by boat.

During the Cold War, the waters were patrolled by gunboats, but people still tried to escape. Mischa Wilke, spokeswoman for Brandenburg Tourism, tells me that one man attached a fake swan to his head and swam over. Wilke takes me to the Glienicker Bridge and explains that various spy-swaps occurred here because the border ran across the middle of it. We then go to Cecilienhof, the mock-English lakeside villa where Churchill, Stalin and Truman met in August 1945 to finalise Europe’s post-war settlement. It’s now a hotel, but the rooms where the meeting took place have been preserved and are festooned with old photographs and memorabilia.

Back in the city, I meet Martin Wollenberg and Sara van Boeckhout of Berlin on Bike, a firm based in Mitte. We cycle through the pretty streets of Prenzlauerberg, a revitalised part of East Berlin, and stop to look at antique shops selling old GDR souvenirs of the Alexanderplatz TV tower. “All that brown and orange plastic is now retro and collectable,” Wollenberg says.

As we cycle, van Boeckhout recounts the words guaranteed to get visitors’ attention. “If they’re drifting off, ‘wall’ and ‘Hitler’ will always revive them,” she says. We cycle through Mauerpark, by the Berlin Dynamo football ground, and into brooding streets still emerging from the GDR gloom. Wollenberg points out undeveloped flats from the era and details such as the old isolators where the wall’s electric wire went.

At Bornholmerstrasse we arrive at an iron railway bridge that once provided access across the border to the East. There is none of the excess of Checkpoint Charlie here – merely a plaque and a careworn plastic bench by way of a memorial. But when van Boeckhout brings out laminated archive photographs of this exact scene two decades ago, it comes alive.

The contrast between the Communist era as a kitsch joke (see panel, previous page) and the grim reality of it is no more evident than at the Stasi Museum, once the headquarters of the East German secret police. The approach along the triumphal boulevard of Karl-Marx-Allee is frightening enough, and once inside, the displays of listening devices and blandly terrifying rooms chill you to the bone.

I look in the visitors’ book, which is made of authentic, poor quality paper. “Just like The Lives of Others come to life,” someone had written, referring to the 2006 film. I recall Richard Campbell’s comment that Stasi memorabilia commands big prices, and that many people wish for the old regime, and think – in Berlin, the past is not another country.

Eastern kitsch

One fascinating dimension of reunification is how people have dealt with the past by laughing at it. This tendency has been called ostalgie, a fond nostalgia for the GDR (ost means “east” in German). Take the new DDR Museum (pictured right), by the river Spree. It’s informative and thoroughly entertaining, with jokey set pieces about nudity and collective potty training (ddr-museum.de).

 The GDR Design Hostel (ostel.eu) on Spandauerstrasse has themed suites, including “scout camp” and “GDR holiday hideaway”, all with original GDR furniture. (Single rooms with a private bathroom cost from €40 per night.) It also sponsors the nearby Volkseigentum (volkseigentum.eu), which houses East German art and design.

The celebration of Communist kitsch extends to shopping and going out. Die Tagung (Wuhlischstrasse 29 in Friedrichshain) is a pub with GDR furniture, food and drinks, while Mondos Arts Berlin, at 6 Schreinerstrasse, sells all manner of GDR products (mondosarts.de). It’s also difficult to avoid souvenirs bearing the ampelmannchen, a little green man from the GDR road system, who has a specialist shop dedicated to him (ampelmann.de).

Real students of the era should go to Eisenhuttenstadt, built as a Socialist model city in 1953 and located about 100km from Berlin. Here, the full GDR lifestyle can be sampled on a tour that will leave you asking for more – or gasping for air.

Useful contacts

Video Bustour – videobustour.de

Berlin on Bike – berlinonbike.de

Stasi Museum – stasimuseum.de

The GPS Wall Guide (a GPS-integrated tour tracing the trail of the wall) – mauerguide.com

Richard Campbell can be contacted via Berlin Tourism: visitberlin.de

See also germany-tourism.co.uk; brandenburg-tourism.com

Accommodation

Hotel de Rome, Behrenstrasse 37; tel +49 304 606 090; hotelderome.com, roccofortecollection.com

Getting there

Ryanair flies from London Stansted to Berlin Schoenefeld twice a day during the week, and once at the weekend. Easyjet flies from Gatwick to Schoenefeld twice a day except Sundays, and daily from Luton. British Airways flies from Heathrow to Berlin Tegel six times a day. Bmi, which codeshares with Lufthansa on the route, flies three times a day from Heathrow to Tegel.

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