TravelVoice Journal - A Post Cold War Trip to Berlin

A Post Cold War Trip to Berlin

As our train hurtled along the track from Frankfurt to Berlin I checked my watch. I couldn’t believe we had been told that this journey would take almost six hours.
We’d been travelling just over two hours and were already two-thirds the way into our trip. Then, the startling realisation that we had crossed the border into the former GDR, as our speed dropped dramatically to somewhat resemble that of a terrestrial mollusc. Even the Russian soldier pedalling his bicycle in the rain along the pitted roadway was moving faster. I don’t think the rail line had seen any maintenance since 1961.

All change at Berlin. Reconstruction has enveloped the city that symbolised the cruel divisions of the Cold War. Now a sense of rejuvenation and excitement is helping restore one of Europe's great cities. Perhaps Someone Up There has it in for Berlin, so violently has the jackboot of modern history stamped on its face.

At the end of World War II it was almost literally smashed into the ground. There were 75 million cubic metres of rubble strewn around and the Trummerfrauern (rubble women) - laboured day and night to move the debris out of the city centre, creating 36 artificial mountains that are today parks and recreation areas.

Then, in 1961, came the Wall. Buildings were pulled down, lives fractured, streets dissected by the politics of hatred. It wasn't a move calculated to encourage investment and a faith in the future. All that changed almost overnight in 1989. As a result, Berlin is now the biggest building site in Europe.

It's an odd cacophony of styles: classical 18th- and 19th-century buildings that somehow survived the fearsome Allied bombing stand cheek-by-jowl with equally fearsome examples of the functional steel-and-concrete of the Sixties. Berliners are excited, apprehensive, confident and fearful, and their skyline is alive with cranes. No longer was I staring at lakes and pastures twinkling across the countryside through the spring drizzle out my carriage window. I was here in steel city.

When you think of canals, Venice, Amsterdam and Bangkok come to mind. Not Berlin. Yet it has almost 200 kilometres of navigable waterways. Canals, and so much green, so many trees, parks and bicycle paths? Where was the Berlin of popular imagination? Of shadows and spies? That Amsterdam comes to mind isn't surprising; Dutch immigrants who moved into the swampy Berlin area in the early 18th century proceeded to drain the area and build dams - as the Dutch seem to do. The avenues that grew up on top of these dams still exist today, as is evident in their names: Kurfurstendamm, Kaiserdamm and Mehringdamm.

I have never seen so much graffiti as in the new Berlin: there is graffiti everywhere. Some clever walls painted at railway stations, and more on every conceivable flat vertical surface through the entire city. The place must be crawling alive at night with adolescents, armed with spray cans in the other. Maybe it's a fallout from the demise of The Wall. At one time they could deface or decorate that with impunity; now, rather than face the withdrawal symptoms, the whole city is fair game.

This is most evident in the leafy area of Potsdam. Behind the Iron Curtain until 1989, the young people there had a field day in the post-1989 years. They thought that freedom meant they could do what they liked. It was difficult for them. Despite this, Potsdam is worth a visit. Potsdam is home to the Cecilienhof, where Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt met to carve up post-war Europe. Built in the style of a British country manor house, it is more incongruous than interesting and worth the trip only for the dilapidated villas that surround it.

They are stark evidence of the not-so-long-ago departure of the Russian army from east Germany. Once lived in by Russian officers, some have been renovated, but many stand empty, gutted by former occupants who took with them everything that wasn't nailed down - doors and toilet seats included. A defaced bust of Lenin plonked in the shadows of a cafe garden also testify to almost 50 years of Russian influence in the town.

The main shopping area is lively and lovely, bustling with newly-opened and recently-renovated craft shops, bars, hotels and cafes. The pretty church square hosts a flea market and, in the narrow streets fanning out from it, Dutch influence is again evident in the red brickwork and gables.

Berlin is a knot of contradictions, where the future and history collide. They continue to collide in the movement of the more bohemian element of West Berlin from places such as Kreuzeberg to the former east as the once-shunned areas close to the Wall are gradually gentrified.

Where the two sides of Berlin met at the Wall, they turned away from each other, creating in the vacuum of investment and development a low-rent area on what had become Berlin's periphery. Almost overnight in 1989, the area returned to the centre of the city. "The Kreuzeberg scene" has slowly moved to a similar area in the former east which is called Prenzlauer Berg where rents are lower. Rents here have gone up as much as 800 per cent.

And the collisions continue, especially in the eastern part of the city where the locals are suspicious of the seemingly untrammelled march of "the West" into their lives. They feel that it is being foisted on them and that their former identity is not respected enough. This is no more evident than on Warsawer Strasse – which prior to reunification had no shops in it to speak of, no cafes, no restaurants. Today it has traffic jams and a McDonalds.

Warsawer Strasse has another claim to fame as the thoroughfare which the communist regime tarted up and used to show off its great socialist city. Visiting delegations were whisked along the street in limos to marvel at the socialist utopia at work. The trouble was, they didn't have enough paint to do-up the whole street. So, on the understanding that the VIPs wouldn't be able to see over the 2nd floor from the limo and would get a only quick glimpse of the sidestreets, they only painted the ground floors and the first two corner buildings at the junctions. You can still see the results today as you gaze along the sidestreets from your traffic jam. It's as if a drab brown-grey gauze has been strung along the street past the first two buildings.

The buildings in east Berlin seem to increase in size and ugliness the more you move away from the Brandenburg Gate. It is quite something to drive up to and through this symbol of Berlin (still surrounded by souvenir sellers from the old east); something you couldn't do until nearly ten years ago. You still can't unless you're in a bus or on a bicycle, but once through you are on Unter Den Linden, which leads to the Schloss Bridge over the canal and museum-strewn centre. Here stand, despite the war and the east German authorities, the Arsenal, begun in 1695, the Opera House, the French cathedral in Gendarmenmarkt, and the Rotes Rathaus (red Town Hall) among other magnificently stately buildings.

There is so much history, facts and figures to absorb in Berlin you will need to take time out. Again the train is the way to escape the Berlin construction zone for a while. We headed for the Wannsee Lake, past isolated hunting lodges, mini-castles and follies built in the Grunewald Forest for romantic emperors and love-lorn kings. Lazing in the sun with the locals. Feeding ducks. It was all good therapy.

To some people Berlin is decadent days and naughty nights in the golden Twenties, when anything could happen in the wildest city in Europe and often did. To others it is the home of fascism, with its torch-lit Nazi rallies festooned with swastikas and the inevitable descent into the lunacy of world war two. And to others again it's an evocative symbol of the post-war world, when communism extended its dead hand over Europe, bringing with it East Germany and the Cold War. For the young, Berlin may well be U2 recording Achtung Baby at the Hansa Ton studios.

Cities are different things to different people, but only Berlin is one thing to all people: The Wall. Until The Wall came down in 1989, Berlin was a microcosm of the post-1945 world. It was where democracy went head-to-head with the Soviet communist dictatorship on either side of 165 kilometres of concrete, watchtowers, bunkers, dog runs, ditches, barbed wire, tank traps, armed guards and death.

When, on the night of August 13, 1961, the East German authorities began to construct what was both an insult to humanity and an admission of defeat, the world was stunned.

It's hardly surprising that such a simple symbol of the struggle between good and evil became a late 20th century icon. John F. Kennedy, in July, 1961, called it "the endangered frontier of freedom". A powerful but simple idea for a world that was only just recovering from a devastating global war fought for the same concepts. On the western side, the wall of shame was decorated with political grafitti. Artists, horrified by what it represented, registered that horror on the very canvas that appalled them.

There were actually two walls, with 30 metres of open ground between them. Within this grim death zone everything was bulldozed away; buildings were razed and everything that could provide cover for would-be escapees was removed.
The inner, eastern side of the final barrier before the safety of the west was painted white so that escapees were better silhouetted and therefore easier to shoot. Chris Gueffroy was the last person to die attempting to escape to freedom. He was shot by border guards in no man's land between the walls on February 6, 1989. Just ten years ago a human being, murdered trying to escape over a four-metre high, 165-kilometre-long Wall that no longer exists in any substantial sense.

200 souls died for the same dream. Their passing is marked in a small corner of this open-air museum for remembrance, a monument to the people who died trying to escape the hated Soviet regime.

Not many of the new Berliners will want to talk about The Wall, preferring to get on with their new lives, but having spent thirty years of my life hearing about it I could not let this post cold war addition to my journal ignore its shame.

CASE NOTES
Destination: Berlin, Germany.

When to go: Best months for mild weather and more acceptable tourist numbers are May-June and September-October.

Getting there: Qantas flies every day except Wednesday from Sydney – Frankfurt, with transport by air, road and rail possible.

Where to stay:(Both these small hotels have web access)
Pension Rotdorn. Heerstrasse 36. Charlottenburg 14055 Berlin;. Hotel Villa Kastania. Kastienella 20. 14052 Berlin

What to read/see: Berlin Tourist Office

Trevor Sinclair
March 1999

Oh Savannah

Trevor Sinclair
June 2003

By Trevor Sinclair

My oh so patient partner and I arrived in Savannah after an extremely tedious drive from Atlanta. Trucks, eighteen-wheelers, trucks, trucks and more trucks. If I’d known more I would have flown. With ticket prices under $50 it’s gotta be worth it. The drive along the Interstate is very lush green and somewhat pretty, but it’s not as though there’s anywhere to stop, apart from finding the most wonderful fresh fruit in the small town of Dudley…somewhere off the freeway past Macon.

A Post Cold War Trip to Berlin

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