The Berlin Wall

I’ve visited Berlin on four occasions, beginning with a visit in August 1990, nine months after the city’s infamous wall came down. This first visit also kicked off a three-month backpacking odyssey through Western Europe. At the time, I was travelling with Dean, an Australian sheep farmer from Portland, Victoria.

Dean and I began our travels in Einigen, a small lakeside town in Switzerland, on 8 August. We’d ended up here, in a turreted lodge on the shores of Thunersee, after dropping off a minivan our group had borrowed while touring Eastern Europe three months prior. I’ll share more about our extraordinary adventures behind the recently liberated Iron Curtain in another post.

Having just witnessed life after communism in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, we considered Berlin and its deadly wall as the holy grail of Cold War destinations. To get there, we activated our Eurail train pass and travelled via Frankfurt to the former West German border town of Helmstedt. This was as close as we could get to Berlin using our train pass. 

During the Cold War, Helmstedt was the site of the Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing, the most important checkpoint on the Iron Curtain frontier. At the time, it was the starting point for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin. According to Wikipedia, 34.6 million travellers passed through between 1985 and 1989. As a result, Dean and I decided it was the best place to hitch a ride to Berlin.

It took more than eight hours to reach Helmstedt by train, arriving shortly before nightfall. To save money, we decided to find a discreet spot on the edge of town and camp for the night. We’d then try our luck at hitchhiking across the border the following day. I use the word "border" loosely. Technically, it existed until reunification on 3 October. However, in practice, all border checkpoints had been officially abandoned five weeks before our arrival.

Dean and I pitched our newly purchased pup tent in a quiet forest, only to discover the following morning that we’d camped on the edge of a railway cutting. We later learned that Helmstedt, thanks to its strategic location, had train lines coming into town from all points of the compass. We’d arrived from the west, then inadvertently intersected another track heading south.

Hitchhiking to Berlin proved relatively easy once we knew what to do. Initially, we struggled to find a ride. Unbeknownst to us, we’d camped on a quiet rural road on the southern edge of town while the main highway traversed its northern boundary. A passing German family eventually took pity on us. 

They drove us to a large roadside service centre about 7km away. It sat next to the recently abandoned border checkpoint, where the boom gates, security lanes and passport booths had been left permanently opened. The eastern checkpoint was eventually preserved as a museum, while the western complex has long since disappeared.

Once at the centre, we scored a ride within 15 minutes. A friendly, middle-aged man in a sporty German car offered us a ride. He gave us our first taste of the unrestricted speed limit on a German autobahn. He tore down the highway at speeds approaching 200kmph, but safely got us to Berlin. He also used his fancy car phone to locate a recently opened temporary youth hostel in the city's outskirts. At the time, Berlin had repurposed several former army barracks to accommodate a sudden surge in visitors. 

We spent four memorable days in Berlin, from 9-12 August, exploring both eastern and western zones, before hitching back to Hanover in West Germany. It was an extraordinary time. Just five weeks earlier, on 1 July, the two Germanys had entered into a monetary, economic, and social union. Then, two months later, were formally unified. As a result, Dean and I experienced much of the communist era’s socialist culture, infrastructure and institutions before they disappeared. 

For example, we passed through the city’s U-Bahn ghost stations, which had been off-limits during the Cold War, received loose change in Ostmarks, the former communist currency and saw most of the Berlin Wall still standing in its original form. I will never forget our first encounter with the wall. 

On Thursday, August 9, exactly nine months after the wall fell, Dean and I caught the U-Bahn to Unter den Linden, near the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate. For decades, the gate could only be reached from East Berlin, and even then, could only be viewed at a distance. As we approached it from the east, the white noise of city traffic gave way to the relentless sound of hammering and chiselling. Then, as we passed through the gate’s majestic columns, a most remarkable sight greeted us. 

In front of us stood the wall, constructed from 3.6 metre high concrete panels, each topped by smooth cylindrical pipes. A barren 50-metre deep "death strip" ran along its eastern flank. The strip's bare, rubble-strewn, weed-infested earth stood in stark contrast to paved streets nearby. Directly in front of the gate, a sizeable gap had been opened up for pedestrians to pass freely. 

However, on either side, the wall's remaining panels had become an impromptu treasure trove for souvenir hunters. People everywhere were hammering away, trying to extract their own small concrete piece of history. Didn’t bring a hammer? Not a problem. Entrepreneurial touts were renting crowbars and chisels by the hour.

Dean and I walked south along the wall until we came across a couple of abandoned rebar poles. We decided to join the crowd and spent an hour carving out our own piece of history. I still have a nondescript hunk of concrete squirrelled away in a tub of childhood papers and relics. Sadly, a selection of colourfully painted fragments we’d salvaged was lost when Dean's day pack was stolen months later.

We followed the wall as far as Checkpoint Charlie, the divided city’s busiest border crossing, then headed toward Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Decades later, it's the starkly divergent cityscape that I still recall most vividly. East Berlin’s buildings were drab, dated and monolithic, while those in the West were modern, colourful and stylish. Much of East Berlin felt like a surreal, dusty time capsule from the sixties and seventies. The austere concrete-scape of Alexanderplatz in the east stood in stark contrast to the bright lights and designer labels of Kurfürstendamm in the west.

I remember walking down a laneway in no man’s land near Potsdamer Plaza and marvelling at rusty tram tracks abruptly abandoned when the wall went up. Likewise, the windows of buildings along the street's East Berlin boundary were filled with rendered brickwork. It was hard to comprehend that walking in this same location just nine months earlier would have had me shot and killed. 

Likewise, we explored the vacant pillboxes and checkpoint barriers that once controlled entry through Checkpoint Charlie. The immediate area, recently stripped of its security infrastructure, was stark and rather depressing. These days, a spotless, neatly finished reconstruction of a single pillbox has taken its place. Tourists now pose for cliché Instagram photos. I saw the real deal.

Perhaps our most poignant communist era encounter occurred at a supermarket in East Berlin. At the time, western consumer goods were pouring into the city’s east following economic reunification. East Germans were going crazy for these coveted products. Even more so, given that Ostmarks could now be exchanged one for one, making quality Western goods suddenly affordable.

While shopping for lunch, we encountered a queue outside a supermarket. Security guards were controlling the crowd inside by limiting access to individuals in possession of a shopping trolley. As a result, every time someone exited the building, the first person in the queue grabbed their abandoned trolley to gain entry. Dean and I tried explaining that we only wanted to buy a few bread rolls and thus didn’t need a trolley. It soon became clear that we weren’t getting in without one!

After spending most of Thursday in East Berlin, we devoted Friday to exploring West Berlin. This included the Europa Centre and a stroll down Kurfürstendamm. This vibrant, tree-lined boulevard was once the commercial, shopping and nightlife hub of West Berlin. 

At the end of Kurfürstendamm, we came upon the jagged ramparts of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It was bombed during the Second World War but was never repaired. Instead, it was left standing in its partially destroyed state as a lasting memorial to the folly of war and crimes against humanity committed under Nazi rule.

We finished the day with a walk through Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. A block or so from the former Reichstag Parliament building we came across a row of white crosses erected along the footpath. Each cross memorialised an East German citizen killed while attempting to escape East Berlin. It’s a sobering experience standing here, trying to make sense of such a senseless loss of life.

Saturday was designated a museum day. We spent the morning at West Berlin Zoo, then caught a train to the Pergamon Museum on East Berlin's Museum Island. Highlights included the enigmatic Pergamon Altar and the incredibly ornate Ishtar Gate. Decades later I’d visit the Turkish hilltop where the altar once stood. Dean then headed for the city's Olympic Stadium to watch an American Football exhibition match while I returned to our backpacker hostel.

Sunday morning, our final day in Berlin, was spent exploring the palace and gardens of Potsdam. Exactly 55 years earlier, to the day, the town’s imperial buildings had hosted a conference where allied leaders planned the postwar peace in the dying days of the Second World War. This included the temporary demarcation of East and West Berlin. Without a doubt, history comes alive wherever you go in Europe. 

That afternoon, Dean and I took a train to the outskirts of Berlin and walked to Checkpoint Bravo on the former West Berlin border. From here, we hitchhiked to Hanover, where we took an overnight train to Oslo, via Hamburg and Copenhagen. I'll add a link here for this next adventure when a retrospective post is published.

I returned to Berlin three more times. First, in 1996, with my parents in tow. We were travelling together through Prague and Berlin after attending my brother’s wedding in Austria. I returned again for a long weekend while travelling to London on business in 2002, then a final time with friends from Sydney while living in London in 2008. You can read about the most recent visit here.

Each time I returned, I’d witness another transformation of the city as it progressively erased the scars of its post-war division. I count myself lucky to have seen Berlin in its truly divided state. These days, only small, rather sanitised sections of the wall still stand (including the popular East Side Gallery), the once barren Potsdamer Platz is filled with soaring glass towers, and the soulless unitarian East German Volkskammer Parliament on Spreeinsel Island is long gone. I wonder what else has changed since my last visit?

NOTE:

Sadly, Dean and I didn't take many photos during our first few weeks on the road. As a result, I've illustrated this story with a mix of images from the web and some taken during my last time in Berlin. If I find more archived images from 1990, I'll amend this post. Until then, the border checkpoint images and ghost station have been sourced from the web.