 Sansoucci Palace in the former East Germany |
 These days all that’s left of the Wall is a short 100-metre section which stands curiously alone in a suburban street just off Potsdamer Platz, metres from Checkpoint Charlie. Open-topped tourist buses file by and tourists crane from their upper decks to take videos and snaps of this last remaining remnant. Authorities have tired of policing the strip and left that job to a heavy cordon of barbed wire. But the pilfering has stopped anyway, as if the Germans had decided this last remaining vestige should stand as a monument to what once was and could be again - a city and country divided.
The Wall is almost unrecognisable, smothered as it is-every inch- with a heavy layer of graffiti and looking more like a post-modern art erection than a symbol of military rule. Other pieces of the Wall-those that don’t sit in private homes- can still be found in the nostalgia museums off Friedrichstrasse.
The wall used to run along the street between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. In some places it ran within a metre or two of people’s houses. How they must have felt - arbitrarily drafted into one camp when they could look out from their first and second storey windows across to another world and another life- so near and yet so far.
Copyright ©Karen Halabi 2007
1800 wds
Digital images available on request of the checkpoint, Wall, graffiti and memorabilia/nostalgia museums.
|
