Recurring visa issues have forced my work hours down to 20 hours per week, and while this is frustrating and somewhat inconvenient in terms of paying bills and enjoying this amazing city, it does have its benefits, one of which being that it leaves me with a bunch of free time during the week. So earlier this week, having finished work at 12.30, I decided that it was far too nice a Monday afternoon to spend it inside learning French and Italian vocabulary, and traded the language books for sunglasses, an MP3 player and my bike.
There are still a whole lot of places in and around Berlin that I want to explore more, so this particular afternoon I chose to venture north into Kreuzberg, specifically the area around Heinrich-Heine-Straße underground station.
Since this year is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and since I'm a bit of a Berlin history nut, I've made it my mission to visit each of the East Berlin/West Berlin checkpoints before the summer is over. Heinrich-Heine-Straße is one of the two within about 15mins ride from my flat. More about Heinrich Heine in another blog post.
So I ventured over to this particular border crossing, and like many of the others, there's very little of it left. So little, in fact, that had I not found it on the offical website of Berlin city, I never would have known it existed. The watchtowers are gone. There are no wall fragments here. The only marker is the double row of paving stones crossing the street at the place where this now busy north-south thoroughfare was once truncated by the "anti-facist protective barrier" as it was referred to by the government of the GDR (former East Germany). You could quite happily cruise on past, completely oblivious to the fact that for twenty-eight years, Berlin's streets, underground network, its rivers and lakes, and most heartbreakingly, the lives of the Berliners, were severed in two by this wall.
Today, twenty years after reunification, the scars marking where the wall cut through the city are in various stages of healing. Some, like Checkpoint Charlie and Bernauer Straße, have been preserved exactly as they were, and the adjoining museums offer visitors a glimpse of what life was like in divided Berlin.
But other scars have begun to fade. Some, like the former train checkpoint at Friedrichstraße station, have retained the original structures. Most however are like Heinrich-Heine-Straße though; the Berlin Wall has been reduced to a thin line of cobblestones crossing the street, and life in Berlin takes place on both sides of the pavers as if nothing had ever happened.
