This photo doesn't say it like the one below but I thought I'd better change something so you know I've delivered on the promise to tell you what happened in Berlin. Nothing big really and yet still the moment I'll always remember from our weekend trip to this imposing city.
As I said before, this was my first – our first, in fact – trip to Berlin. I’d always wanted to go there to see The Wall but never got round to it. When The Wall came down in ’89, I really regretted not having been there earlier. Same story for Bud. And so we went there knowing that we’d already missed a very significant part of the city’s history. Not having been there before, you can’t really appreciate how the city was divided into East and West. The residents – helped by several thousand tourists, no doubt – tore down the wall and threw away almost every last trace of it. There’s one stretch left that’s become a sort of historic monument and there’s part that’s been reconstructed for the tourists at Checkpoint Charlie (see photo below).
I’d read all that in the papers over the years, so I wasn’t particularly looking for a ‘wall experience’ on this trip to Berlin. The first thing that surprised me was how difficult it was for a first-time visitor to sense which part of the city had been West and which had been East. The Wall ran zig-zag through the centre and these days, even the locals aren’t quite sure any more where it was. Truth is that the western part of the city looks rather neglected because the real building work is going on in what used to be the eastern side.
Anyway, we were staying just a couple of streets away from Checkpoint Charlie and Bud was keen to have a look. I wasn’t too bothered, to be honest, since I knew The Wall was already long since gone…
We turned into the street, just a grey street like any other. As we got nearer to the House at Checkpoint Charlie (housing a museum about The Wall), we passed snack bars and a shoe repair shop named Charlie This or Charlie That. The number of little shops selling tourist nick-nacks increased. After the crossing shown on the photo above, there’s just a short stretch of street before the section of reconstructed wall shown in the photo below. The place is crammed with tourist shops selling everything from old Gestapo helmets to postcards declaring ‘You are leaving the American sector’. In the middle of the road – Friedrichstrasse, now running all the way through into the former east side – there’s a border post (a little hut) with sandbags in front and a young soldier, presumably an American, stood there in uniform and holding the US flag. Dozens of tourists are standing around, clicking away on their digitals and taking it in turns to go and stand with that good humoured guy and have their pictures taken for posterity.
Ticky-tacky, trashy, tourist trap, I thought, as we went past the sign warning that we were ‘leaving the American sector’ and crossed the road to inspect the fake, pristine clean white wall that now no longer cuts Friedrichstrasse in two. It’s a lot thinner and lower than I would have expected. There’s no barbed wire on the other side as there used to be. Just a small forest of black crosses, each labelled with the name of one of the 80 people who died trying to get out there. The mini ‘cemetery’ is on both sides of the road. There’s a maroon-coloured van and some cars parked on the other side, blocking the view. And two gigantic adverts on both sides of the street. And something in a glass box construction that seems to be advertising a concert. And what look to be Middle Eastern immigrants selling the worst tourist trash from a row of market stalls just beyond The Wall.
I don’t know whether it was seeing the crosses that did it. I don’t really think it was. It certainly wasn’t the atmosphere. And I couldn’t feel sentimental about a piece of so obviously reconstructed wall.
Fact is, the moment I crossed the line where The Wall once stood, emotion welled up in my throat. It was only three steps to those tacky market stalls but I was already in tears when I got there. Trickling down my cheeks. You don’t ‘do’ this as a Brit. There was dull thud feeling in the middle of my chest – like The Wall went straight through the heart. It felt so real that it would have hurt to touch the spot. It wasn’t just the crosses, the thought of those who got shot there, it felt more like the pain of all those lives torn in two – families divided, hopes shattered by that monstrous wall. That’s all I could think it was. Where else did this dull ache come from? Apart from those crosses, certainly not from anything I saw or heard around me. It was a sunny day, the trish-trash sellers were happy enough and the tourists were enjoying this swinging city – as I was too. Enjoying Berlin, with a dull ache in my heart.
Places have memories. Hearts broken leave their mark. My heart and yours, maybe they’re just nodes on one big network.
I never saw the Berlin Wall. I felt it.
I’d read all that in the papers over the years, so I wasn’t particularly looking for a ‘wall experience’ on this trip to Berlin. The first thing that surprised me was how difficult it was for a first-time visitor to sense which part of the city had been West and which had been East. The Wall ran zig-zag through the centre and these days, even the locals aren’t quite sure any more where it was. Truth is that the western part of the city looks rather neglected because the real building work is going on in what used to be the eastern side.
Anyway, we were staying just a couple of streets away from Checkpoint Charlie and Bud was keen to have a look. I wasn’t too bothered, to be honest, since I knew The Wall was already long since gone…
We turned into the street, just a grey street like any other. As we got nearer to the House at Checkpoint Charlie (housing a museum about The Wall), we passed snack bars and a shoe repair shop named Charlie This or Charlie That. The number of little shops selling tourist nick-nacks increased. After the crossing shown on the photo above, there’s just a short stretch of street before the section of reconstructed wall shown in the photo below. The place is crammed with tourist shops selling everything from old Gestapo helmets to postcards declaring ‘You are leaving the American sector’. In the middle of the road – Friedrichstrasse, now running all the way through into the former east side – there’s a border post (a little hut) with sandbags in front and a young soldier, presumably an American, stood there in uniform and holding the US flag. Dozens of tourists are standing around, clicking away on their digitals and taking it in turns to go and stand with that good humoured guy and have their pictures taken for posterity.
Ticky-tacky, trashy, tourist trap, I thought, as we went past the sign warning that we were ‘leaving the American sector’ and crossed the road to inspect the fake, pristine clean white wall that now no longer cuts Friedrichstrasse in two. It’s a lot thinner and lower than I would have expected. There’s no barbed wire on the other side as there used to be. Just a small forest of black crosses, each labelled with the name of one of the 80 people who died trying to get out there. The mini ‘cemetery’ is on both sides of the road. There’s a maroon-coloured van and some cars parked on the other side, blocking the view. And two gigantic adverts on both sides of the street. And something in a glass box construction that seems to be advertising a concert. And what look to be Middle Eastern immigrants selling the worst tourist trash from a row of market stalls just beyond The Wall.
I don’t know whether it was seeing the crosses that did it. I don’t really think it was. It certainly wasn’t the atmosphere. And I couldn’t feel sentimental about a piece of so obviously reconstructed wall.
Fact is, the moment I crossed the line where The Wall once stood, emotion welled up in my throat. It was only three steps to those tacky market stalls but I was already in tears when I got there. Trickling down my cheeks. You don’t ‘do’ this as a Brit. There was dull thud feeling in the middle of my chest – like The Wall went straight through the heart. It felt so real that it would have hurt to touch the spot. It wasn’t just the crosses, the thought of those who got shot there, it felt more like the pain of all those lives torn in two – families divided, hopes shattered by that monstrous wall. That’s all I could think it was. Where else did this dull ache come from? Apart from those crosses, certainly not from anything I saw or heard around me. It was a sunny day, the trish-trash sellers were happy enough and the tourists were enjoying this swinging city – as I was too. Enjoying Berlin, with a dull ache in my heart.
Places have memories. Hearts broken leave their mark. My heart and yours, maybe they’re just nodes on one big network.
I never saw the Berlin Wall. I felt it.
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