On the day the Berlin wall came down, artist Kani Alavi was looking down from his third-story studio window just a block from Checkpoint Charlie, the border between East and West.
“For me, the people came like a wave, floating into freedom,” said the man I met while walking the course of the former wall.
“It was a wonderful event,” he said. “Three hundred thousand people came across. Walking, on bikes, in Trabants. Families were meeting and hugging. They went on a huge shopping spree, buying magazines, keyboards, music tapes.
“All I could say was, `Welcome, welcome, welcome.’ “
To many of us, it hardly seems possible that a decade has passed since the Berlin Wall opened on Nov. 9, 1989.
Nor does it seem long before that, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy told a cheering crowd “Ich bin ein Berliner.” (He’d meant to say, “I am a Berliner” in a show of solidarity. What he actually said, by including “ein,” was “I am a doughnut.”)
But this year is indeed the 10th anniversary of the wall’s demise. And 1999 also marks other major momeEnts in German history.
It is the 50th anniversary of Germany as a republic. The 50th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Airlift, designed to thwart a postwar Soviet blockade of the city. And this year, the German government will move from Bonn to Berlin.
All of these events have helped transform Berlin into a city that is dramatically different than it was 10 years ago. Or five years ago. Or even last year. People here believe it is the fastest-changing city in Europe.
Anyone who hasn’t been to Berlin in a few years wouldn’t recognize it.
To get a sense of that change — what Berlin had been like during the 28 years it was divided by the wall and what it is becoming — I recently walked 24 miles through the city’s heart, along the wall route.
That was just the section that went through the central city. The border once snaked 93 miles around West Berlin. Of that, about 65 miles were walled and 28 miles were set off by barbed wire.
“No matter which way you went, you ended up in the East,” joked Horst Sprenberg, a 74-year-old Berliner I met on my walk.
Not everyone would want to take such an urban hike. It’s tiring. Your feet get battered. And much of the route is no more than depressingly long stretches of weed-choked lots that once had been the wall’s no-man’s-land.
But it does highlight places, historical and modern, worth seeing.
Only seven sections of the wall still stand. One is along Bernauer Strasse, where the wall is preserved as a memorial. A graffiti-clad watchtower overlooks the Nordhafen canal. Another section is near the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, where you can still buy postcards with the famous sign that read: “You are now leaving the American sector.” Another wall section is at the East Side Gallery on Muhlenstrasse, parallel to the Spree River, where in 1990, 110 artists from 21 countries painted wondrous murals.
The wall was the past. The Berlin of the present is changing faster than a Las Vegas showgirl.
Construction cranes lurk everywhere like preening birds stopped on their migration route. While Berlin’s 3.5-million residents are pleased with the construction, they can’t help but complain about the constant banging, thudding, clanging and grinding of heavy equipment.
Right now, Europe’s biggest construction site is at Potsdamer Platz in the heart of the city. Before World War II, this was the busiest square in Europe. First battered by Allied bombs then hemmed in by the wall, the area became a wasteland, scraped to raw ugliness.
Now, with money from huge companies such as Daimler-Benz (now DaimlerChrysler) and Sony, Potsdamer Platz is becoming a shining new city within a city.
Skyscrapers have popped up like summer corn. Glass and steel office towers shoulder for room with the Grand Hyatt Hotel, apartment buildings, more than 100 stores in a snazzy shopping mall and Germany’s first multiplex with an IMAX theater.
Not far away, near the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, built in 1894 as the seat of government for a united Germany and burned in 1933 under the Nazis, is being completely redone as the parliament building for the reunited Germany. Nearby, more hulking new government buildings are being rushed to readiness along the Spree River, which winds through the city.
Massive construction doesn’t mark all the changes.
For years, the place to shop in Berlin was the Kurfurstendamm, the famous shopping street known as Ku’damm. It still is very popular. Every day but Sunday, people still stream into the stunning KaDeWe department store, the Harrods of Germany.
But if you’re looking for what’s hip and hot, visit the Mitte (MITT-uh). Formerly in the East, it has reclaimed its position as the “middle” or center of the city. In the midst of being gentrified, Mitte still has buildings pockmarked by bullets fired during World War II. But here you find Berlin’s chi-chi art galleries, the see-and-be-seen-in restaurants and clubs, the cutting-edge artist hangouts.
Shoppers also swarm along Friedrichstrasse, which stretches north and south through the heart of the city, to buy everything from Mercedes Benzes to Donna Karan clothes, Gant to Gucci and the Foot Locker to T-shirts and burgers at Planet Hollywood.
Turn-of-the-last-century buildings are being converted into turn-of-the-big-deutschmark condos that sell for $300,000 and up. Dingy shops that once sold furnace coal now fizz up cappuccinos for $3 a cup.
My trek began in the north on Bernauer Strasse on a typically bleak November day. After a quick glance at a section of the wall at Mauer (Wall) Park, I walked along a weedy, trash-cluttered strip of empty lots between rows of apartment buildings.
When the border was closed on Aug. 13, 1961, news photographs shot on Bernauer Strasse shocked the world. Desperate people stood on ledges and hung from windows, trying to escape to the West.
Today on Bernauer Strasse, you still can see what the wall looked like when it was up. There is no graffiti. Though the East built the wall, police in the West made sure it stayed clean and hence more inhumane looking.
The wall was not one barrier but parallel ones, each 13 feet high. In between them was a wide death strip lit by high-powered lights. It had a 9-to-12-foot-tall wire mesh fence running down the middle with sensors. Guard towers were strategically located. Soldiers patrolled with dogs. There were no land mines placed in the city, though they were put elsewhere along the East-West border.
The problem for escapees was not climbing over the wall, but making it across the death strip alive.
An estimated 5,000 people managed to escape. At least 160 were killed in the attempt. Another 260 were shot and wounded, and 3,200 were arrested.
“In reality, it was a death machine,” said the Rev. Manfred Fischer, 50, of the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation on Bernauer Strasse.
When the border was closed in 1961, Fischer said first barbed wire was put up. Then apartment windows were bricked in. Then the death strip was cut and the walls erected.
Escape plots sprang up everywhere.
Fischer told of how engineering students dug a tunnel under the wall in 1964. They started in the basement of a Bernauer Strasse bakery in the West. Fearing exposure, they hid the dirt and kept their project secret even from people in the building.
Finally, after tunneling 100 yards to the other side of the wall, 40 people crawled through to safety.
As I continued tracing the route, I walked northwest along Gartenstrasse, then southwest to the Spree River, passing through once middle-class neighborhoods now filled with Berlin’s poor, particularly many Turkish immigrants.
By the river, I found one of Berlin’s more bizarre sights. It was a graffiti-clad, gray cement watchtower, 40 feet tall and with a searchlight on top. Today it stands in the middle of a new children’s playground, flanked by an ultra-modern apartment building colored strawberry and salmon.
Nearby three sections of the wall stretch about 150 yards through Invaliden Cemetery on the river. It was there that the first man was shot to death while trying to escape, on Aug. 24, 1961. Gunter Litfen, 24, was swimming to freedom across the river when an East German guard shot him three times with a machine pistol.
South of here, paralleling the Spree, new government buildings now block the wall’s old route. Men in hard hats halted all traffic as they rushed their work to completion.
Passing through the muddy construction sites, I walked just east of where the Reichstag is being rebuilt, complete with a new glass dome, and toward the famous Brandenburg Gate, built in 1789.
Before heading south, however, I left the wall route and walked into the Mitte. On Oranienberger, I found the Takeles (pronounced TAH-ka-less).
Soon after the wall fell, artists took over this partially bombed-out building. They covered the walls in graffiti, buried cars in the backyard as sculpture and set up studios, a stage for modern dance, a cafe and a movie theater.
To them it was free art space. And they squatted, paying no rent. Again and again, the city tried to throw them out. Again and again, the artists persevered.
International sympathy built for them when tour buses made Takeles a regular stop. Just last November, the artists got private funding and the city agreed to let them stay for 10 years.
Some 50 artists have set up shop.
“It’s an unbelievably great deal,” said Andreas Schiller, 35, a painter whose work — endlessly repeated renderings of fruit — has been shown in London and New York. He once painted 1,998 apples for a New York exhibition. (The Big Apple, get it?)
Shaking his long blond hair, Schiller said the old building houses world-class artists and raw beginners.
“It gives artists an opportunity to make legitimate projects,” he said. “And it’s all possible at Takeles.”
From Takeles, I walked down Auguststrasse, checking out the side streets. When I was in Berlin nine years ago and then again eight years ago, grass and weeds grew out of the tops of some of these war-battered buildings.
Now they’re taking on the look of historic charm.
Coal furnaces are being converted to gas. Old paint is being scraped away. Berlin’s equivalent of tenements are being converted to condos. And every few doors, there are fancy art galleries with track lighting, shops selling vintage wines and expensive boutiques offering handbags or shoes or dresses and linen sport coats.
What, for the most part cannot be seen, is that many buildings hide a series of courtyards. One place to get a peek is at Hackescher Hofe, just off Grosse Hamburgerstrasse. Here the courtyards are open, displaying not only apartments and condos but restaurants and a live theater.
Back on the wall route at the Brandenburg Gate, I strolled along Unter den Linden, named for the long string of linden trees planted down the center. It was once one of Europe’s grandest boulevards.
When the area was in the East, it was a stark picture sketched in the grays of a No. 2 pencil. Sullen gray office structures, sullen gray museums, sullen gray people. It stood in sharp contrast to the technicolor West with its neon, brightly lit shops and gaily dressed people.
Now the grays are fast disappearing. The Eldon Hotel, on Under den Linden a couple of blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, has been polished to a new patina and now is considered Berlin’s finest. Turn south onto Friedrichstrasse and there are the new-car dealerships, stores selling fancy chocolates and boutiques with the latest fashions.
Farther down Unter den Linden, I passed the State Opera House and came to the Spree River and Museum Island, aptly named for its collection of museums. The island was the original site of the city when it began as a tiny, 13th Century trading post.
The museums are the Altes Museum, Neues Museum, Alte National Galerie, Bodemuseum and the Pergamon Museum. Except for the Altes and Pergamon, the museums are closed for rehabilitation until 2001.
When I go to Berlin, I never fail to visit the Pergamon. It has an astounding collection of Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Islamic and Middle Eastern art and architecture. Most stunning of all, is the Pergamon Altar from a Greek temple that was built in 165 B.C. in what is now Turkey. The altar is the size of a three-story building — and just the front of it is here.
The Altes art museum has some treasures from the national gallery on display during the renovation.
Continuing east, Unter den Linden changes its name to Karl Liebknecht and soon I arrived at Alexanderplatz. This is a truly ugly example of East German architecture, raw and soulless. The distinctive 1,200-foot TV Tower, a broadcasting tower, by its height alone has become a landmark. But it’s surrounded by tacky shops and a treeless desert of concrete. It is, however, a transportation hub for subway trains and buses.
On Nov. 4, 1989, 700,000 people crowded onto Alexanderplatz in one of the largest demonstrations in German history. They came to protest the communist German Democratic Republic, loudly but peacefully.
Five days later, the wall fell.
After I returned to the wall route again near the Brandenburg Gate, I passed the new U.S. Embassy being built just south of the gate, across from Tiergarten Park, a large park with gardens, walkways and a zoo. No tree in Tiergarten Park is older than 55. In the fierce winters after World War II, impoverished Berliners chopped down every tree for firewood.
Soon I reached Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s Oz. Here is the new Berlin. The towers of its 20 new buildings — hotels, offices, apartments, entertainment complexes — shine in the night.
In the 1920s, Potsdamer Platz was Europe’s busiest center, jammed with cars, pedestrians and trams. It got so hectic, city fathers were forced to install Europe’s first traffic light there in 1924. It was hand-operated.
Potsdamer Platz is bigger than ever. Its new stores and theaters are drawing 100,000 people every day. Germans come even on Sundays when most of the stores are closed. They love to window shop.
While Germans adore these new buildings and shops, they’re more ambivalent about a 120-foot stretch of the wall that stands nearby. The city wants to tear it down to make way for another road into the area.
Erich Stanke, who claims to own that section of the wall — though he’s somewhat vague about how this ownership came about — wants to save it.
“It could be one of the last parts of the wall that’s intact,” Stanke said. He told me about a series of court actions he has initiated to keep the wall standing.
“It’s important that the children see what it was. It was a symbol of world division . . . a silent symbol of Berlin,” he said. “Fifty percent of the visitors come to see the wall. But if there is no wall, it’s deceiving.”
It’s frustrating, Stanke said. “It’s a part of German history,” he said, “but there’s more of the wall in America than here.” (One section is on display at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, in fact.)
On the other hand, many Berliners feel the same as one retired man I met. “Old people don’t want the wall. We have seen it long enough,” he said.
Farther on, I stopped at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum on Friedrichstrasse.
It’s a private museum that’s more tacky than slick, but you can see some of the wonderfully inventive ways people used trying to escape from the East.
Eight people flew over the wall in a hot-air balloon. One came in a one-man submarine. A 19-year-old was sneaked across in a car’s gas tank; another lad hid in the seat of a Volkswagen. A child was carried across in a suitcase.
A half-hour walk eastward took me across the Spree River again and the dramatic East Side Gallery that runs along Muhlenstrasse.
This is 1,500 yards of artistic passion. The 110 artists from 21 countries made the 118 murals along the wall just after the border was opened in 1990. It was made a national monument in 1992.
Some paintings are surreal. Some carry political messages. Some have become famous: a Trabant (an East German car) crashing through the wall; the famous kiss of Erich Honecker, general secretary of the East German Communist Party, and Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev.
Many of the paintings are badly deteriorated, because of the type of paint used and the crumbling wall surface, said Kani Alavi, who not only is one of the East Side Gallery artists but its president.
He is trying to save the paintings, but the task is expensive, costing between $20,000 and $30,000 per painting. Finding private sponsors has been hard, he said.
“Germans have trouble dealing with their history,” Alavi said after describing the joy of those who came through Checkpoint Charlie 10 years ago.
“The wall shows a brutal part of our history, a part that should not be repeated. But most Germans just want it to be forgotten.”
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
A number of international carriers go to Berlin, usually with a stop in Frankfurt. Just as with the rest of Europe, airline prices are higher during the summer season, but great rates can be found in fall, winter and early spring. While shoulder season prices can fall as low as $300 to $400, high season rates can hover around $1,200.
LANGUAGE
At least some English is spoken in most major stores, tourist sites and hotels.
TRANSPORTATION
Getting around Berlin is relatively easy. Taxis are plentiful. And the public transportation system — buses and subway trains — is quick and safe in most sectors of the city.
Once you get to Berlin, ask the concierge at your hotel for a Welcome Card. It costs about $10 and gives you three days of free transportation on the subway and buses. It also has discounts and free admission for tours at certain museums (including Checkpoint Charlie), theaters, the zoo, botanical gardens and other attractions.
MONEY
One dollar is worth about 1.8 deutschmarks. ATMs are just about everywhere, so you can get cash when you need it.
WHEN TO GO
Try to go in the warmer months. I’ve been there twice in June and it’s glorious. On this trip I went in November and the weather was sour, gray and cold. Generally, May through September is fine; November through March can be grim.
INFORMATION
For hotel and other information, contact the German National Tourist Office at 122 E. 42nd St., 52nd Floor, New York, NY 10168-0072; 212-661-7200; e-mail gntony@aol.com; www.germany-tourism.de.
The tourist office has a list of hotels with prices and restaurant information. And it will send a quarterly magazine about Berlin with updated information about events.
