Millay Hyatt
>Walking the trail of the Berlin Wall
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Millay Hyatt writes of the journey along the fallen wall in 13 parts @ Design Observer.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )I. Early last year, I made a pilgrimage. I’d been thinking about something none of us in Berlin, where I’ve lived for a decade, thinks much about any more, until an anniversary comes along anyway: the fact that half of us were once enclosed by a wall that kept the other half out. Motivated less by the background noise of cultural commemoration than by an impasse in my personal life, I wanted to test myself against the Berlin Wall. Breathe some fresh air, feel in my calves and the balls of my feet the great curving length of that two-way trap that held millions of people in its grip for 28 years. Impasse indeed. The Berlin Wall Trail marks both the historical path of something as preposterous as a wall dividing a city as well as the astounding fact of its bloodless demolition. Something worth paying homage to; and perhaps performing the ritual of walking it would give me some creative ideas for how to get rid of my own little Berlin Wall. So, on a crisp February morning, my 36th birthday, I packed my map and a thermos of water and set off.
II. Carving its way through urban center and periphery for just under 100 miles, the Berlin Wall created a host of unlikely enclaves, exclaves, cul-de-sacs and impossible conundrums. It kept apart friends and lovers, doctors and patients, libraries and overdue books. (Peter Schneider tells a wonderful story in The German Comedy: Scenes of Life after the Wall, of an East Berliner who borrowed books from a West Berlin library the day before construction of the Wall started on August 13, 1961, and returned them the first chance he got: November 10, 1989.) On one side covered with snide and sweet graffiti, on the other sternly blank, the wall not only divided Berlin; it seemed also to take semiotic hostage of the city, which became a symbol of the hard division — the iron curtain, as Churchill called it — between the warring interests of East and West.
But then, twenty years ago, it “fell,” as if it were an old man or an autumn leaf. The two cities melded together again and the chunks of the Wall still standing, like smudges the eraser missed, are there for tourists to photograph and locals to hurry past. I cross its former path many times a week, often several times a day, without thinking about it. My neighborhood was one of those odd protrusions that gave the Wall its lumpy, upside-down-Christmas Tree shape. It used to encase this section of Kreuzberg, in what was once West Berlin, on three sides — West and East being ideological terms in Cold War Berlin more than geographical ones: if you were to head southeast, northeast, north, or northwest from my apartment, you would be on your way to “the East,” or at least to the barrier that marked where the East once began. This made for a certain coziness, or so those who lived here then like to tell it: punks, squatters, draft dodgers and mainly Turkish immigrants left to fend for themselves in a parallel, anti-bourgeois universe unthinkable in most parts of West (or East, for that matter) Germany. Before the party ended — or began, depending on your point of view — in November 1989, they used to picnic on Schlesische Strasse, today a noisy thoroughfare, then an asphalt playground blocked by the Wall at its eastern end and the river Spree to the north. My walk officially begins where the Landwehrkanal (which translates as defensive canal; a defensiveness, however, that predates the Wall) crosses under Schlesische Strasse and empties into the Spree.
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