My First Visits To Berlin, Germany

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I visited Berlin the first time in 1950. 'East Berlin' as the West Germans used to say, but the capital of the GDR (German Democratic Republic) then. I don´t remember much. A photo shows me standing at the shore of a lake. This is nothing surprising as Berlin is one of the greenest cities in Germany. Only one third of the whole area has been built on, the rest consists of gardens, parks, forests, rivers and a chain of lakes which are connected with each other through a system of canals and rivers. Having left the GDR clandestinely in 1955 I visited the other side, West Berlin, the next time. This was in 1985. For West Germans Berlin was the so-called front city surrounded by the GDR = enemy country, a bulwark against communism. I visited the eastern part with a visa for a day (one had to be back at midnight) via the crossing at Friedrichstraße. I was obliged to change Deutsche Mark (the money of West Germany) into the money of the GDR (which was nicknamed toy money) with which I didn't know what to do (we regularly sent parcels to our relatives in Saxony because they had so little). This was a surreal encounter, unfortunately, it was real. Until the erection of the Wall on August 13th, 1961, Berliners were allowed to cross the borders between the three Western sectors (the American, the British and the French one) to the Eastern one (the Soviet sector), and vice versa, and then for 28 years visits were only a one-way affair. I saw the Wall (155 km/96 miles long, 3,60 m/ 11.8 ft high) still standing. It may sound absurd, but I’m glad I had the chance to do so. Of course, I knew it from photos and films, but the real thing was a different matter. There were some wooden constructions with platforms on the Western side onto which tourists climbed to peep over the wall and across the so-called death strip with watch towers which was closed off to the East by another wall. In the West people lived near the wall, some had it only some metres in front of their houses. The people in the East had been evacuated so that one only saw dead window holes. Ghastly. The fact that the Western side of the Wall had developed into the biggest outdoor graffiti gallery didn't help much. The pic at the top shows one the famous graffitti paintings: a Trabi (Trabant), a car built in the GDR, trying to crash through the Wall. Tourists visiting Berlin today are disappointed because they can't see the Wall anymore. There's only a very short piece to be seen and a line in the pavement in the city centre where it stood. It's not enough to convey the feeling of the walled-in city. Why haven't the Berliners kept more as a monument? They were sick of it, that's why.