Fall of the Berlin Wall

Berlin doesn’t forget. It just mutates. Concrete slabs become canvases. Watchtowers become tourist traps. But beneath the layers of currywurst stands and souvenir shops selling faux fragments of tyranny, you can still hear the echo of boots on asphalt. Still feel the tension of a city once sliced in half by ideology and barbed wire.

Construction of the Berlin Wall started in 1961 and a decade later it had grown to 43 kilometers, completely surrounding West Berlin. Roughly 5000 people managed to escape, a tenth of them being police officers. Over 200 people were killed during escape attempts.

I once visited Checkpoint Charlie where there is a museum demonstrating ingenious methods of escape, conceived by desperate citizens. There are many books on the subject and I can recommend “It happened at the wall” by Rainer Hildebrandt which has a lot of interesting photographs.

Summer by the wall, a long time ago.

Exactly twenty years ago, the Wall was opened and Germany was reunited about a year later. I saw the flickering images on a grainy TV set back in 1989, people dancing on concrete like it was Mardi Gras in November. Perhaps I was too young to fully grasp the impact of this monumental event, because in my mind, the Wall had always been there.

Slabs of the Wall still stand along Zimmer strasse.

The German band Alphaville released their famous song Summer in Berlin about five years before the Wall fell. I try to think back on those times and understand what life was like in the city back then.

“It’s a summer in Berlin
The heat of the sun which is stored in the pavement feels so fine
That’s when you’re longing
For a summer by the wall”
— Alphaville, Summer in Berlin (1984)

All these years later, the Wall is still here in fragments, in outlines on the pavement, in the stories that locals carry like faded Polaroids.

Berlin doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. It’s raw, unresolved, stitched together from contradictions and concrete dust. A city that reminds us that freedom is never clean, and that even the fall of a wall leaves rubble behind.