Berlin Wall stories

Chris Moss visits Europe’s most happening capital on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall and Kathyrn Miller guides us through the Wall's potted history. Plus the best Wall-related spots to visit and events to attend.

Berlin twenty years on

A security guard waved us through and we passed along a sort of jetty into the darkness. Clouds obscured the moon, but there was a faint silver glow above. The disco/gallery owner pointed her torch ahead and we followed.

As my eyes adjusted I was able to make out garish colours, abstract forms, graffiti, and then, as we got closer, the vertical face of the wall.

Project 'Write the Wall'

We were standing in something that was no longer exactly no-man’s land but had yet to become anything else. A swathe of wasteland behind the improvised Tape nightclub had been given over to a project called Write the Wall: at regular intervals a camera set on time lapse took a picture of the Wall, so that later it could be projected as a film. Ulrike Huthmann, the disco/gallery owner, said this project, like the club, was temporary. ‘There are already plans to build here,’ she said. ‘This is prime real estate, and we already know development is being considered.’

She pointed away to the gleaming arched walls of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Europe’s grandest rail hub, opened in 2006. Right now it’s only connected to a joke three-stop U-Bahn, and a British-style mayoral cock-up with the overland S-Bahn – closing lines by not providing funding – means getting to it is a challenge. But reunified Germany is all about linking up, curating history and developing space; and one day the main station will be the focal point of everything, no doubt.

Back inside, with the throb of the club coming from the far wall, we toured the gallery with Tape curator Lutz Henke. There was an exhibition of works – well-executed paintings, primitive films, hundreds of stills – by Croatian artist Uros Djurovic. ‘They’re almost all self-portaits,’ said Lutz. ‘Uros is a genuinely strange person, with a strange sense of himelf, and of his body.’ It was noirish woodcut-influenced gangster realism, with a strong undercurrent of violence; imagine ‘The Sweeney’ shot in pre-1989 Eastern Europe. I’d been guided to Tape by Henrik Tidefjaerd, a Swedish expat working as a ‘trend scout’ and travel guide for the fashion and media brigade. Over four hours he showed us a cool pop-up restaurant, an offbeat ‘drag trash’ bar and Tape, but the Wall, in the empty space, in the darkness, was more memorable than any of the party stuff.

Funny thing was no one was sure if the Wall had originally been at that exact location near Tape. It was equally likely, Ulrike said, that it had been relocated. But the location didn’t seem to matter half as much as the fact that the slab of reinforced concrete was there as a monument.

East Side Gallery

The following day I went to visit the East Side Gallery, the 1.3km stretch of Wall along the Mühlenstrasse in Friedrichshain that was given to 118 artists in 1990. Gaby Reynolds, an official Berlin tourism guide, explained that the walls were being repainted for the twentieth anniversary of the Wall falling – to be celebrated on November 9 with a Festival of Freedom. ‘Over the years, the original works commissioned were graffitied over and destroyed,’ she explained.

I asked who had done that. ‘Well, not the people you might expect,’ she said. ‘It’s people who have no real purpose in life, no beliefs, but many of them are from the middle classes.’

This rather Ballardian vision of Berlin’s rebels was intriguing. Graffiti-ing over official art seemed to me to be very Berlin in some ways (I kept hearing ‘very Berlin’ while in the city, though I was never quite sure what it meant), or at least it fitted my ‘Christiane F’-tinted 1980s fantasy about the city. And Tape curator Lutz had dismissed the artists who’d worked on the East Side Gallery as ‘nobodies, contributing to a heritage project’. Perhaps the middle-class hooligans had a point.

Exploring new Berlin

Gaby also took me to the beach bars on the Spree, to the pretty Hackescher Markt and Sophien Strasse to see Berlin’s maze of courtyards – brimming with galleries, cafés, restaurants and little shops – and to the Scheunenviertel (or Barn Quarter), formerly a Jewish ghetto and still full of poignant reminders of Berlin’s worst years.

I spent two nights at a new hotel, Michelberger (www.michelbergerhotel.com), not far from the East Side Gallery. It was a high-rise, dreary grey building, typical of East Berlin, but the owners – a group of 14 friends – had refurbed it to create a low-budget 119-room boutique hotel. Rooms were small, white and basic, and mine had a view of an ugly refuse depot as well as the new – and, believe it or not, even uglier – O2 World arena.

On the Saturday I moved to the West, to the Abba hotel (www.abbaberlinhotel.com). I can’t say I missed the Michelberger too much; but I did miss the East. The Ku’damm, Zoo and surrounding areas are all slightly annoying – full of Audi drivers and overpriced cafés but not much grander really than, say, the western reaches of London's Oxford Street. Or perhaps it was the logos, ads, lights and general business of capitalism. In any case I felt slightly alienated in the wealthy half of the city.

On the Sunday, following suggestions from both Gaby and Henrik – who had nothing in common but their recommendations – I hopped on a tram to Prenzlauer Berg. This former East Berlin working-class tenement zone is now one of the city’s coolest districts. Where the West is crammed with retail, finance and aspiration, the East has been regenerated largely by people: small companies, young families, independent restaurants and hip little bars.

There aren’t many green spaces – Stalin and his East German stooges weren’t big on gardening – but somehow a small, tree-shaded square like Helmholtzplatz is almost as peaceful and bucolic as any of the hidden corners of the vast Tiergarten in West Berlin. I walked aimlessly through a multi-ethnic, classless (or at least class-melding), visibly vibrant neigbourhood before stopping off at a small, pavement caff called Im Nu (Lychener Strasse 41) for a glass of wine and cheap snacks. I wasn’t sure how best to make my way back to the Abba so hopped on a tram to Nordbahnhof. Berlin, like London, is sprawling, and you spend a lot of time moving around – which means you are often in the shadow of railway stations.

The tram passed a section of the Wall en route. Unlike the East Side Gallery or the Tape club’s bit of Wall, here a lot of it was left blank, just how the East German soldiers would have liked (so they could see the silhouettes of budding escapees and get a good aim). There had been no repair work done on one section, so the concrete was flaking off and weeds were attacking the base and some of the sectional joints. This seemed fitting and far more suggestive than art. There were a few people around, but I guess the northern reaches of Mitte are slightly off the tourist circuit: I didn’t alight from the tram, contented with a moment of ‘found history’ and not in need of another Wall photo for my collection. But perhaps I should have taken more.

East vs West

Twenty years is not a long time to rebuild a city, and the Germans have already done pretty well at stitching their capital up in newbuild. It seems unlikely Berlin will have so much decay and melancholy empty space on show in 2029, and we can’t really expect the government and its tourist departments to accept that Berlin’s most evocative districts are the empty ones.

At some point in a weekend visit, you can’t help but bump into the Brandenburg Gate and, close by, the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz. The former is Teutonic monumentalism in all its grandiose arrogance – and instantly forgettable. The outer structure of the latter – a huge glass cupola supported by stainless-steel ribs – is quite impressive, but the innards of branded eateries, a flashy cinema and pseudo-alfresco bars are depressing.

Sixty years ago (Berliners give an exact date of September 4 1949) West Berlin invented that abomination of cuisine, the currywürst – but random, low-grade ethnic fast food outlets, burger joints and global brand eateries are even forcing that to go east. Standing at the centre of the ersatz piazza in the Sony Center, I longed for Prenzlauer Berg, for Friedrichshain and for the brutalism of Alexanderplatz (where I actually did eat a currywürst, with, incongruously, a glass of prosecco).

Berlin is, it seems, a divided city once again. The rush of capital into the city is bent on making it into an über-Frankfurt, a trading and consuming centre to rival London and New York. But the underclass, bohemians, gays, the Left, fashion designers, clubbers and the stylishly disaffected want something else.

So do I; so, probably, will you, when you next visit Europe’s most exciting city (and yes, that includes London).

History of the Berlin Wall

1945

May 8 USA, Great Britain and the USSR declare victory in Europe; during the course of the war they had resolved to divide Germany, once defeated, into occupation zones thus allowing the country to be administered by the victorious powers.

FebYalta Conference: France comes on board as an occupying power.

Aug Potsdam: the victorious powers approve the four zones and the four sectors of Berlin, the eastern boundary along the Oder-Neisse line as well as the economic unit of Germany.

1949

May The Federal Republic of Germany is established with Bonn as its capital.

Oct The German Democratic Republic is formed with Berlin as its capital.

1961

Spring The economic situation in the GDR worsens dramatically, and there is an increase in the flow of refugees to the West.

June 3-4 Vienna Summit: Nikita Khrushchev, party chief and Soviet head of state, and American president John F Kennedy fail to defuse tensions over the Cold War.

June 15 Socialist Union Party general secretary Walter Ulbricht tries to dispel rumours that West Berlin is about to be sealed off. ‘Nobody has any intention of erecting a wall,’ he announces.

Aug 13 In the early hours, armed workers’ militia groups, police and soldiers begin erecting a barrier made from concrete blocks and barbed wire across the city along the boundary between the sectors of East and West Berlin. The West’s response is initially surprisingly low-key.

1989

Nov 9 Wall breached.        

Nov 10 Demolition commences.

1990

Oct 3 Germany officially reunified: Berlin becomes a single city.

Nov 30 Demolition officially completed (though the last section near Brandenburg disappears in November 1991).

Wall-related Berlin

Sights

East Side Gallery
A 1.3km section of the Wall decorated on the east side (the western side has been whitewashed) with more than 100 paintings by artists from around the world.

www.eastsidegallery.com.

Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer
Immediately upon unification, the city bought the stretch of the Wall that's found here to maintain as a memorial.

Haus am Checkpoint Charlie
This private museum opened not long after the DDR erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 with the purpose of documenting the events that were taking place.

Wall tours

www.mauerguide.com.
www.stadtverfuehrung.de.
www.videobustour.de.

Read

‘Berlin Tales’ (edited by Helen Constantine, translated by Lyn Marven) Evocative short stories by authors born and bred in Berlin during the past 130 years (OUP £9.99).

Diary dates

Festival of Freedom at the Brandenburg Gate

A 2km-long wall of huge dominoes, built by schoolchildren, will tumble at the designated anniversary minute, video screens will project images of the fall of the Wall, and fireworks will light up the sky. The festival begins with an open-air concert by the Staatskapelle Berlin conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Nov 9 2009. More info at www.mauerfall09.de and www.visitberlin.de.

‘Scenes and Traces of a Fall’

Photographers’ records of the events of November 9 1989: people climbing the Wall, Trabants honking their way into West Berlin, and the commotion at Pariser Platz.

Until Dec 3 2009. Max Liebermann Haus (www.brandenburgertor.de).

‘Radical Change in Berlin’

An artistic review of the past 20 years, with works by Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean and Wolfgang Tillmanns, as well as DJ sets, concerts and readings.

Until Jan 31 2010. Berlinische Galerie (+49 30 789 02 600/www.berlinischegalerie.de).

‘The Art of the Two Germanys During the Cold War’

Exhibition of works created in the divided Germany, featuring paintings, sculptures and video work by 120 artists including Hans Haacke, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.

Until Jan 10 2010. German Historical Museum (+49 30-247 49 700/www.kulturprojekte-berlin.de).