This week marks the anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall.  The story is familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1940’s through the 1960’s.  In the wee hours of the morning of August 13, 1961, East German security forces sealed off the border, hoping to stem the tide of emigration that had reduced the population of East Germany by nearly 2.7 million inhabitants during the previous 15 years, roughly 15% of the population. 

When I lived in Berlin during the early 1980’s, the wall had become such an imbedded fixture in the city that the thought it would cease to exist within ten years was to me simply unimaginable.  I’m ashamed to admit it now, but in the early 1980’s I had even questioned the desirability of its removal, fearing the potential instability such an event could cause in US-Soviet relations.  Of course, it didn’t occur to me then that the Soviet Union’s days were also coming to an end.  After all, in the early 1980's the Soviet Union was still ruled with an iron fist by the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, men who had come of age during the darkest days of Stalin’s rule.  East Germany’s de facto head of state was Erich Honecker, a tough and bitter old man who had spent most of the years of the Third Reich in a Nazi prison, and later became the perfect apparatchik of the Stalinist regime that replaced the Nazis. 

One dreary autumn day in 1981, I grabbed my little Kodak Instamatic camera, left my Zehlendorf apartment on the outer fringe of West Berlin, rode the bus to Dahlemdorf, where I caught the U-bahn subway to Kreuzberg, and made the ten minute walk to the inner city portion of the Berlin Wall.  I spent the next several hours walking along the western perimeter of the wall snapping pictures and ruminating on the fate of this great, old city that had played such a pivotal role in 20^th century affairs.  Was its day in the sun forever past?  With businesses and families understandably hesitant to stay in a city surrounded by barbed wire, watch towers, and an ugly gray wall, was Berlin doomed to die a slow death?

When you look at the pictures I took that day, the answer would appear to be an almost unequivocal “Yes”.  But Berlin today is nothing like the Berlin of 25 years ago.  So my photos represent a little piece of history, a literal snapshot in time of a place that no longer exists.

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Pictured below is Potsdammer Platz.  Before World War II, this had been one of the liveliest centers of commerce in Berlin.  The area was destroyed during the war, and with most of it located in the Soviet zone of occupation, its reconstruction was never given any priority.  Although the ruins were cleared out, the buildings were never rebuilt.  When the wall went up, it ran right through Potsdammer Platz and turned it into a No-Man's-Land.

The graffiti in the center of the picture says "HALT!  HIER ENDET DIE FREIHEIT" ("STOP!  HERE ENDS FREEDOM").  The Western authorities erected a small tower at Potsdammer Platz to enable people to peer over the wall into the East.  If anyone ever needed proof that it was more desirable to live on the western side of Berlin, this was the place to find it.

This is what Potsdammer Platz looked like in 1925, when it was the center of activity in Berlin:

With the fall of the Wall, and Berlin's rebirth as a center of European culture and commerce, Potsdammer Platz has reassumed its former place of importance.  This is what Potsdammer looks like today, from an aerial view posted on Wikipedia:

Here is another view of the wall at Potsdammer Platz:

Note how it was built right in the middle of the cobblestone street.  The red graffiti says "NIEMAND HAT DIE ABSICHT, EINE MAUER ZU ERRICHTEN  -  W ULBRICHT"  (NO ONE HAS PLANS TO BUILD A WALL  -  W ULBRICHT).  W. Ulbricht refers to Walter Ulbricht, East Germany's head of government at the time the wall was erected.  He made that comment on June 15, 1961, two months before the wall went up.

From the old center of business and commerce, I walked another 15 minutes to the monumental centerpiece of pre-war Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate.  Built on the site of Berlin's old defensive medieval wall's ceremonial gate, the present day structure was built in the late 18th century to represent Prussia's ascendancy to the status of a major European power.

At the Brandenburg Gate, there was a gap in the wall so the view of this great monument would not be obstructed.  The Gate was a popular tourist attraction for those living east of the Iron Curtain.  Perhaps the East German authorities did not want too obvious a symbol of their repression directly in front of this tourist site.

The Brandenburg Gate stands at the center of one of the world's great thoroughfares, Germany's equivalent to Paris's Champs Elysees, or New York's Broadway .  East of the Gate, the road is called Unter den Linden, where many pre-WWII German administrative and cultural landmarks were located.  West of the Gate, the road was called Charlottenburger Chausee, and runs through the beautiful Tiergarten Park to the suburb of Charlottenburg.  The Charlottenburger name was changed by Western authorities in 1953 to commemorate the June 17, 1953 uprising against the Soviet-supported government of Walter Ulbricht.  What started out as a modest worker's strike for a reduction in stringent work quotas, quickly escalated into a general strike with demands for free elections, threatening the collapse of Walter Ulbricht's Communist regime.  When the day was over, 21 were dead, and many more injured in the first popular uprising against a Stalinist government in Eastern Europe.

Shortly after the failed uprising, the street was renamed the Strasse des 17. Juni (Street of the 17th of June).  Here is a view of the street, looking toward the Siegessaeule monument.  I was about half way between the Brandenburg Gate and the monument when I took this photo.

 I'm lucky I didn't get hit by a car taking this shot!

"Siegessaeule" is German for "Victory Column".  It was designed to commemorate Prussia's victory over Denmark in the first of Bismarck's wars  that led to German unification.  The column is topped with an 8.3 meter high bronze statue of the Angel of Victory.  The angel was added to the monument's design following the Franco-Prussian War of 1871.

Just a few blocks from the Brandenburg Gate is the Reichstag building.  Construction for this building was completed in 1894 to house imperial Germany's Reichstag , or Parliament.  This is the building that was destroyed by a fire shortly after Hitler assumed power.  The Nazis blamed the fire on German Communists, and used its destruction as an excuse to suspend civil rights and outlaw competing political parties.  

Pictured below is what the Reichstag looked like in 1981.  The wall ran behind the building, and is just visible on the right side of this picture.

The building was never fully repaired following the 1933 fire.  Prior to the fire, there was a large dome in the center of the building.  Its ruins were removed for safety purposes.  Although the building was renovated in the 1960's to repair the war damage, most of it remained empty, and by 1981 it was showing definite signs of deterioration.  In the late 1970's and 1980's, the main floor of the building housed an excellent exhibit on German history.  Otherwise, it was rarely used from 1933 until the 1990's, following German reunification.

Today, the building has been restored, and houses the German Bundestag.  The old name, Reichstag, is only used to refer to the building, not the actual parliament.  The parliament itself is called "Bundestag" (federal diet) to shed the anti-democratic, imperialistic connotations of the word "Reichstag".  Here is a picture of the building as it appears today, complete with its new dome, itself a popular tourist attraction:

The Berlin Wall came to a stop on the left (north) side of the building due to the presence of the Spree River.  Following several successful escape attempts through the river, including one using a homemade submarine, the East Germans put a large chain fence in the water to prevent both swimmers and underwater craft from using the river as a means of escape.

Here is where the wall stopped at the river, with memorials to many who tried, and failed, to make it to the other side.  

Several of the crosses are marked "Unbekannt" -- Unknown.  Their bullet-ridden bodies would be discarded by the Eastern authorities, anonymous victims of an ugly regime, who had been murdered next to its ugliest symbol.  On the other side of the river, the wall would start up again, and continue for nearly 100 more miles.