Berlin Wall: A city's evolution

In the 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's capital has come a long way.

I first visited Berlin shortly after the fall of The Wall. In the immediate aftermath of “Die Wende” – the change – the city was still two separate halves, only just beginning the process of knitting itself back together. The old tourist maps were often wrong because street names were subject to the contested renaming or reclaiming of names they once had. The U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines were not yet fully integrated, and one still had a sense of the severity of disconnection when the trains trundled through the old “ghost” stations which had been unused since the construction of The Wall in 1961. Large portions of the Berlin Wall still stood, and the once fortified “no man’s land” was a blighted reminder of the decades-long stand-off between the superpowers. In terms of the Cold War, after all, this is where the rubber literally hit the road. The Berlin airlift symbolically heralded the beginning of the Cold War; and Die Mauerfall – the “Fall of The Wall” on November 9, 1989 – signaled its demise.

The most vivid memory of my second visit to Berlin in 1995 is of construction cranes – awkwardly intersecting yet elegantly suggestive of a new skyline. “Wessis” complained bitterly about the laziness and naïveté of “Ossis,” as well as the economic and social costs of reunification. Former East Berliners, meanwhile, felt subjected to a hostile takeover dressed up as pan-German benevolence. Apparently they were supposed to feel grateful for unemployment, asset-stripping, and the complete invalidation of their recent history – no big surprise that fewer Berliners voted for reunification than anywhere else in the former East Germany. By the mid-1990s, The Wall was gone, and Checkpoint Charlie already felt like a rather dated and silly tourist attraction, and the text panels of the museum reflected a Manichean language and urgency that seemed left behind and out of place.

During my third visit in 2003, I can recall calling my husband in Toronto from a pay phone in Potsdamer Platz, and screaming into the receiver over the traffic noise, “I have seen Berlin, and it is the future!” By now the starchitects of the post-Cold War era had left their mark on the new cosmopolis. Always a city at the crossroads of Europe, long a centre of avant-garde culture, and indelibly marked by radical politics of the extreme Left and Right, Berlin was now comfortably settling into its new role as the capital city of reunified Germany.

I’m now about to board a plane to visit Berlin again – this time to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism. The city is primed and pumped for the occasion – literally dozens of exhibitions and concerts are being held, though I’ll sadly be missing the U2 concert by just a few hours. The plan is to soak in as many of the commemorative events and activities as possible, to share my observations with The Mark readers, to teach my traveling companion – my 16-year-old daughter – as much about the tragedy of the twentieth century as possible, as well as Berlin’s seminal place in it.