When we landed in Germany, we knew we had two places
to visit: Bavaria and Berlin. After exploring the fascinating city of Munich,
we headed to our last stop in Germany: Berlin. Berlin was by far the largest
city we had visited on our tour yet—it could easily take an hour to get from
one side to the other via subway. The subway was not the easiest form of
transportation to figure out, nor the most reliable (trains were often late),
and we were bested by it twice when we crept out of our hostel to find a free
walking tour. We never did get that tour, but we were able to explore the city
on our own time and focus on what we wanted to see, so maybe that was a good
thing.
The first place we visited was Charlottenburg
Palace, a grand palace where Sophie Charlotte, wife of Frederick I of Prussia
and mother of King Frederick William I, spent many of her years. The palace was
huge. Every room dripped with baroque ornamentation, whether it was
floor-to-ceiling porcelain displays or wall-to-wall mirrored ballrooms.
Honestly, it was a bit overwhelming; I’m not really that interested in extreme
decoration, and Faeth was none too impressed, either. The gardens were very
beautiful, though.
The palace was built in the 1600s and expanded in the 1700s
What we were really interested in seeing while in
Berlin was the Berlin Wall—or what was left of it, anyway. Between 1961 and
1989, a fourth of Berlin was walled off behind a 12-ft tall, 4-ft thick
concrete wall, topped with barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers. But the
point of this wall was not to protect the city from invaders; no, this wall had
a far more sinister purpose: to keep the citizens of East Berlin trapped
inside. Until the wall came down in 1989, any visitors to the city had to pass
through highly-secured checkpoints, such as Checkpoint Charlie (which my mother
had to pass through as a child when her father was stationed in Germany), and
almost no one was allowed out. This didn’t stop brave Germans from
trying—sometimes successfully and sometimes fatally. By 1989, 5,000 had managed
to escape East Berlin (some successful schemes were driving a race car under a
barrier and creating a hot air balloon out of sheets), but another 150 at least
lost their lives in their attempts.
A barrier between East and West
Faeth and I had quite a time finding the infamous
wall, since there were only parts of it scattered across the city. We managed
to find one memorial with a line of wall still mostly intact, big enough that
we could start to get a sense of what it was like to live behind it. We also
discovered a “Wall Walk,” a line that traced that path of the wall around the
city while it had still stood. We followed this line all around the old city
barrier, stumbling across other memorials and Checkpoint Charlie in the
process.
At Checkpoint Charlie, two reenactors in U.S. army
uniforms stood holding American flags. On one side, a sign proclaimed, “You are
now leaving the American sector,” while across from that sign another declared,
“You are now entering the American sector.” Both signs were in English and
Russian. The American reenactors laughed and posed with tourists, while along
the road reenactors in Soviet uniforms offered free “East Berlin” passport
stamps. It was all very fun, yet I couldn’t help thinking that it must have
been a very different sight 25 years ago when people tried to cross those
borders.
You could take your picture with the "guards" at Checkpoint Charlie
I also couldn’t help thinking about what sort of
government could be so oppressive, could fail so terribly at protecting and
nurturing its country, that it had to build a wall around itself to keep its
citizens in. What kind of country was so bad that people risked imprisonment
and death in crazy schemes to escape? Where people were so desperate to leave
that they’d literally flee with the shirts on their backs and leave their lives
behind? East Germany was touted as a “workers’ paradise,” yet the workers
wanted to be anywhere but there.
Say what you want about the United States and its
government, but we don’t need a wall around our borders to trap people inside.
If you don’t like America and have the guts to do something about it instead of
just whine, you are free to walk away. We won’t stop you. And a few people do
leave, but thousands and thousands more arrive every year seeking asylum from
oppressive regimes that murder them for their political and religious beliefs.
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