Gallery: Berlin, then and now

Published Sep 15, 2014

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Berlin - It's been 25 minutes at least since we got on the U-Bahn in Berlin's Mitte district, and still the subway stops keep coming — Potsdamer Platz, Gleisdreieck, Bülow Strasse.

Aargh. Listening with one ear to the Valley Girl chatter of the 20-somethings across the aisle, I wonder where all these American kids in the city are coming from. Not to mention the Swedes and the Poles, the French and Spaniards, Israelis and Russians. And the ones whose languages I can't identify. It's a veritable mini-UN here in Germany's capital.

Next stop, Zoologischer Garten. Why is this taking so long? It never took this long to get around before.

Well, of course it didn't.

That's because “before” was more than a quarter-century ago, when the Berlin I knew was half the size it is today. You know, in the days of the infamous Wall, which cleft the occupied city in two and turned West Berlin into an island of freedom in a communist sea.

West Berlin was Berlin back then. “I'm going to Berlin,” I'd say — just Berlin — whenever my reporting job sent me there from the West German capital of Bonn. And that other half-city, over the wall? That wasn't Berlin. That was East Berlin, a forbidding fortress of a place, gray and lifeless, brooding and dull.

Berlin, by contrast, was bright and shiny, chic and fashionable. I'd flit up and down the Kurfürstendamm, the elegant shopping avenue, and have lunch at the Hotel Kempinski and shop at the famous department store KaDeWe, and sometimes I'd head to Checkpoint Charlie for a quick incursion into the East. (And hold my breath until I got back out.)

And it never took long to get anywhere, because eventually you always ran into the Wall. Which we foreign correspondents knew would never come down in our lifetime. Until — shock — it did.

And now it's been 25 years — exactly 25 on Nov. 9 — and it's all just one big, sprawling city, open and free and exhilarating, construction booming and change all over the place.

But now it's a slog to get across town, from our hotel in the former East Berlin to my friend Tony's place in Charlottenburg, the heart of the former West. As we get off the U-Bahn (which couldn't even run this far back then) and make our way down the leafy streets, I muse whether people even think of the city that way anymore. Do they remember the Wall?

Because I still do.

I can't believe it. What used to be Checkpoint Charlie is a circus. There's a big crowd milling around in the street at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse. Tourists are streaming in and out of the souvenir shops surrounding the little booth that stands on the spot where American MPs used to check papers of those crossing into East Berlin. It's not real — just a replica of the original guard booth that stood here in 1961, when the wall first went up.

It comes complete with a stack of sandbags, a copy of the original sign ominously warning, “You are leaving the American sector” (the real one's in the nearby House at Checkpoint Charlie Museum) — and actors in military uniform who'll gladly pose for a photo with you. The laminated sheets dangling from their waists let you know it'll cost you “2 euro; 3$US.”

Sheesh. This is a little cheesy, no? Here? At the former gateway to grimness?

But that was then, this is now, and now there's no shortage of takers for those photos. My husband and I watch a steady stream of folks join the two handsome phony young guards with their rifles — a young blond woman, a couple of kids who strike a thumbs-up pose, two giggling and grinning teenage girls.

Lots of other people just click away from the sidelines. They're all going to end up with the same selfie of a fake Checkpoint Charlie. But hey, better a fake one than a real one. And the photogs seem pretty happy with it, like they're celebrating, even.

There's an air of revelry all along Zimmerstrasse approaching the checkpoint intersection. “Curry at the Wall” shouts a big sign topped by a Berlin bear holding up a giant sausage, advertising the city's signature street food, currywurst (sausage covered in curry-infused ketchup).

As we pass the Trabant museum, a couple of the little rattletrap East German cars, painted in kooky neon patterns, come tootling down the road. They're back from a tour, the drivers going “honk, honk” on the tinny horns and waving like celebrities.

It's capitalism with a capital C.

But Bernauer Strasse, the memorial to the city's 28-year division by concrete, is much more sober. No tourist-trapping here. But also way fewer people.

We walk up in the morning through Prenzlauer Berg, which was Dissident Central in the East German days. Then, it was dark and gray and empty, the prewar buildings still pockmarked with bullet holes. I was stalked by the Stasi — the East German secret police — here. But now it's prettily spruced up and cheery in the August sunlight, and the idea that someone would be following you with suspicious intent is just ridiculous.

As we arrive at the memorial stretch where the Wall stood, I hear a tour guide across the street: “So over here was West, and over there was East,” he says.

I'm standing in what was East Berlin, on the now-grassy ground of the former “death strip” behind the Wall, staring at the side of a building adorned with the gigantic blow-up of one of the most famous photos of an East-to-West escape — a helmeted East German soldier leaping over barbed wire into freedom in 1961. This happened just a little ways from here.

We walk along the route of the Wall, which is marked by a row of upright metal rods, past young girls turning cartwheels on the grass, blithely oblivious to the past. But my husband is fascinated by the many round metal “coins” in the sidewalk that commemorate East Berliners' escape attempts — successful and not so — over the decades.

We pass the modernist Reconciliation Chapel, built in 1999 on the site of the 19th-century Reconciliation Church that the East Germans blew up in 1985, just four years before the end.

And then there it is — a preserved section of wall. My husband shoots a few snaps of me in front of it (it rises straight from the sidewalk and towers above my head), and then we cross the street and climb up an observation tower to look down on the re-created death strip behind the gray concrete.

Yup, that's what it looked like — dirt and barbed wire and a watchtower, and on the far side, another wall. It's a scene I saw lots of times in years gone by.

But it just seems unbelievable now.

I'm just gaga for Ampelmann.

“Oh, Tony, your traffic-light guy's wearing a little hat,” I remark as we cross the street after dinner. A strutting little behatted green “go” figure has just taken the place of his arms-spread-wide red “stop” counterpart. “That's so cute.”

“Oh yeah, that's Ampelmännchen,” says Tony, a British journalist who's never left Berlin. “He's Eastern, you know. Just about the only Eastern thing that's been adopted citywide. It's the only thing they won out on.”

Ah, yes. After the Wall came down, the West with all its glitz and money invaded the East and took over, and the poor Ossis, or East Berliners, felt overrun and overwhelmed. It's nice that at least one Ossi creation has united and conquered.

It helps that he's so adorable. In fact, Berlin's official bear mascot had better watch out: A couple of days after I notice Ampelmann (that's “traffic-light man” in German), we're on our way to busy Alexanderplatz (the “hub” of East Berlin), and right on the main drag is a whole store devoted to the little fellow. As I stock up on Ampelmann gummis and T-shirts and place mats and mugs, my husband grouses, “I can't believe they have a whole store devoted to a traffic light.” But of course they do. It's capitalism!

And it's moving across the East, as evidenced by the construction and cranes. In the Mitte district, the formerly forlorn heart of Berlin that was mostly trapped behind the Wall, a massive communist-built TV tower remains on Alexanderplatz. But down on Unter den Linden, the Kempinski chain has rebuilt the ruined Hotel Adlon as a five-star celeb centre. (“That's the Michael Jackson hotel!” says a breathless bicycle tour guide, referring to the infamous episode when the late singer dangled his infant son from a hotel balcony.)

And the huge, boxy presidential palace that the communists built after razing the war-damaged royal Hohenzollern palace is gone, to be replaced by ... a replica of the Palast der Republik, a parliamentary building. Oh, the irony.

And Berliners know from irony. “If we didn't have the Wall and the TV tower and the Brandenburg Gate, there'd be no tourism in Berlin,” says Frank Barleben, pedalling us in his velotaxi down to the East Side Gallery (another preserved section of Wall, this one covered in artists' murals). He gives me a wink. “Do you think Walter Ulbricht” — the East Geman president who ordered up the Wall in 1961 — “thought of that?”

No, I bet he did not. Nor do I imagine that he imagined a museum of East German motorcycles. And a store that sells East German products (scratchy dish towels, anyone? — although, I do have to get a couple of these matchbox-size Trabis for the nephews). And the interactive DDR Museum, which is jampacked when we visit. I'm crushed in a line inching its way through the first exhibits toward the noisy Trabant in the corner and a crowd of kids waiting to “drive” it.

And what's with all the kids? Do they even know what DDR stands for? (That would be Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the official German name for East Germany.) Maybe not, but they're all over the place, fighting to weigh themselves on the scale in the model East Berlin apartment (careful, the phone's tapped), and sitting behind the big bureaucrat's desk in the office space, and peering into the ersatz dissident's prison cell with its spare bed and toilet.

They're having fun, but they'll never know what it was really like.

Not like at Hohenschönhausen, a former remand prison far in the depths of the east. The walled-in red-brick prison complex in a tree-lined residential neighbourhood was where dissidents and other political prisoners were brought to confess to their “crimes” before being formally tried or expelled from the country. Back in the day, says our guide, Björn, it didn't appear on any maps, and the shoe-box houses all around it were occupied by Stasi agents and their families. So no nosy Parkers would sniff around, inquiring about what went on behind that wall, you see.

The complex had a role in the 2006 movie The Lives Of Others. But this was no movie. The whole place is creepy, especially on this gloomy, rainy day, with the windowless cells in the basement, and the antiseptic halls up above, and the metal doors with their peepholes and the cramped, caged outdoor cells where the prisoners took their “exercise.”

There's nothing interactive or theme-park here. It's just the real thing, chilling in its drabness. After reunification, the government wanted to demolish the place, Björn tells us. “But former inmates rose up and protested,” and the place opened for tours in 1994.

To keep another piece of the real East Berlin alive. If you care to remember.

“It's like sitting on top of history.”

This is my husband on our dining choice for the evening — the restaurant on the roof of the Reichstag, the German Parliament building.

It's historic, all right — the Reichstag, not the restaurant. The Nazis are famously believed to have burned it in 1933, then blamed the communists and other “troublemakers” so that they could consolidate their power. In 1945, it was seized by the occupying Soviet troops, who planted their flag on the ruined roof. After the Wall went up, just yards away, it sort of sat there, just an occasionally used West Berlin event and exhibit space. But when the Wall fell, it was the scene of joyous, triumphal celebration.

And now it's back, a glitzy contemporary restaurant, serving fine food with panoramic views of Berlin. Even better is an observation area at the top of the glass dome that now crowns the building. That dome's a big attraction; I can see the people snaking their way up and down the ramps to the top. My favourite factoid from our sightseeing bus tour: The dome's glass represents transparency in government, and the visitors walking inside it show that the people are above the government.

We've spent most of this day in my old Berlin stomping grounds, now known as City West, doing all the things I used to do — shopping at KaDeWe, lunching at the Kempinski (now Kempinski Bristol), strolling the KuDamm. It felt like old times. But these times are better, for sure.

What a thrill to walk right through the Brandenburg Gate, from former West to former East, just like that. I'm thinking this as we stand in the dome and stare at that monument, lit up and glowing in the dark below. I bet all those young people we see there every day, crowding the Pariser Platz like a German Times Square and gabbling in their cacophony of tongues, don't give it a second thought.

That whole East-West thing? So 25 years ago.

Though perhaps not quite erased yet. The next day, we're walking down the Friedrichstrasse and pass a young 20-something couple on bikes consulting a street map on a corner.

“Oh,” says the young man. “We were in the West.” He sounds confused. “But it looked like the East.”

You're getting there, Berlin. Maybe just another 25 years.

Zofia Smardz, Washington Post

 

If You Go...

WHERE TO STAY

Soho House Berlin

Torstr. 1

011-49-30-405-0440

www.sohohouseberlin.de

Super-hip hotel with funky, fun decor, in a former department store that served as headquarters for the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, after World War II. Part of the London-based chain. Rooms from $197 (about R1 800), but rates vary.

 

Hotel Adlon Kempinski

Unter den Linden 77

011-49-30-22610

www.hotel-adlon.de

Luxury hotel built on the site and in the style of the original of the same name. Rooms from $304.

 

WHERE TO EAT AND DRINK

Engelbecken

Witzlebenstr. 31

011-49-30-615-2810

www.engelbecken.de

Traditional German eatery serving Bavarian and Alpine dishes with an organic twist. Entrees from $12.50.

 

Lutter & Wegner

Charlottenstr. 56

011-49-30-202-9540

www.l-w-berlin.de

Classic, elegant Old World restaurant serving traditional German and Austrian cuisine, such as potato soup ($10) and veal goulash (about $24).

 

Dachgartenrestaurant Käfer

Platz der Republik 1

011-49-30-2262-9933

www.feinkost-kaefer.de

Rooftop restaurant in the Reichstag, offering contemporary cuisine and sweeping city views. Dinner entrees from about $39. You must supply your name and date of birth in advance and bring a valid ID (other than passport) for entry to the Reichstag.

 

Monkey Bar

Budapesterstr. 40

011-49-30-12-02-21-21-0

“It's the only cool place in the west,” said a friend of this popular rooftop bar in the 25hours Hotel in the Bikini Berlin mall, with fabulous views and a long menu of cocktails, wines and more. Cocktails from $12.50.

 

WHAT TO DO

Berlin Wall Memorial

Bernauer Str. 119

011-49-30-467-98-66-66

 

www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en

Walk a stretch of the Wall and learn about its infamous history. Open-air exhibit and memorial garden: Daily 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Visitor centre: April-October, Tuesday-Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.; November-March, Tuesday-Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Free.

 

House at Checkpoint Charlie Museum

Friedrichstr. 43-45

011-49-30-253-7250

www.mauermuseum.de

Tells the dramatic stories of East German escapes (and attempts) and displays artifacts from Berlin's divided days. Daily 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. About $16.50; students $12.50; ages 7-18 $8.50.

 

DDR Museum

Karl-Liebknecht Str. 1

011-49-30-847-123-731

www.ddr-museum.de/en

Sunday-Friday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. About $9.20; children $5.25.

 

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial

Genslerstr. 66

011-49-30-9860-8230

www.stiftung-hsh.de

English-language tours daily at 2:30 p.m. About $6.50; students and seniors about $3.30; schoolchildren about $1.30.

 

Reichstag

Platz der Republik 1

011-49-30-227-32152

Register in advance on the Web to visit the glass dome. Daily 8 a.m. to midnight. Last admission 11 p.m.

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