Walled In.........The Berlin Wall

[OLDEREK]

Heard about this wall but never really knew about it, a good insight to it here http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=d8c_1254518174

[JimN]

An interesting animation, Derek.

One of the most interesting places on the surface of the planet.

My dad was doing his national service in the late forties and was in West Berlin for part of the time the airlift was on. That, and my European Geography course, meant that I was always interested. I once went to Berlin by car. This was two years before the fall of The Wall and the Iron Curtain and I stayed in a suburb on the south-west side of the city: 'Nikolassee'. The house I was in had a long back garden which ran south towards the East German border (though there was another street in between). I was in a ground-floor room with French windows, and in the mornings I was awoken by the rattle of automatic machine-gun fire along the "death strip".

Let's see if I can locate the house on Google Maps. Here it is - on the south side of 'Barnhelmstrasse', approximately in the middle of that page:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=52.420269,13.202401&spn=0.002041,0.005568&t=h&z=18

I stayed mainly in West Berlin (checking out all the places I had learned about as a geography student), but took a trip by coach to East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie. That was a day to remember. The complete inside and underside of the coach (which itself was East German-operated) was checked, the underside by guards with little mirrors and cameras on trolleys pushed underneath. Checkpoint Charlie was fairly picturesque by the standards of the area it was in (the tourist side of things was important to East Germany) and the delays weren't all that bad. We were ferried round the eastern part of the centre of Berlin: the area above Hitler's Bunker, the Brandenburg Gate, Unter Den Linden, Alexanderplatz. Then out to Treptower Park (for the massive Soviet War Memorial) and to a bar alongside the River Spree to spend some Deutschmarks on beer and pastries. In retrospect, I wish I'd gone as a foot tourist via the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn station. Then I could have walked about and suited myself.

My guesthouse was also near the Gleinicke Brucke which had carried (and now carries again) the main German Bundestrasse B1 over the river which marks the boundary between (West) Berlin and the area of Potsdam. It was closed to traffic because it wasn't an approved crossing place, but it was often used for east-west prisoner exchanges as shown in countless films and TV programmes. I recognised it immediately and was able to at least venture onto the eastern side of it (in West Berlin, of course).

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&source=hp&q=Gleinicke+Brucke&ie=UTF8&hq=Gleinicke+Brucke&hnear=&ll=52.409226,13.098879&spn=0.032672,0.089092&t=h&z=14

I missed out a trip to Spandau Prison (Rudolf Hess was still held there). I regret that now because he died about a week later and the prison was immediately demolished by the British Army.

When I went back (in 1997) with my son (10 at the time), everything was different.

JN