Ghosts of East Berlin (Now available on Amazon)

The Wall: A View From the East

View from the East 

One morning, my class went on a field trip to tour the city center. We walked down Unter den Linden until we came to the metal barricade which marked the end of our journey. Unter den Linden was the main east-west street in Berlin which was bisected by the Wall. It is in the heart of historic Berlin and included many notable landmarks, including the iconic Brandenburg Gate. It was here, in the center and most visible part of Berlin where the implications of the Wall were perhaps greatest. For Brandenburg Gate and other cultural relics of Berlin's proud past were off limits, verboten. They were highly visible and heavily guarded in their special place located right in the center of No Man's Land. It was as if Brandenburg Gate and its environs were timeless temples of the Gods and we humans, from both the east and the west, were prohibited. In our collective exile, we were reminded that the Gods were here before the Wall and they would be here long after. The Wall was our fate, the people of this time who lived it and breathed it.  

My classmates and I spread out in line looking at the sights before us, prohibited from taking one more step forward. But Unter den Linden itself kept going right into the Wall itself. It traversed through No Man's Land, under the Wall and then became an inhabited street once again in the West. Its path included the Brandenburg Gate which stood in all its majestic glory, a relic of the past, untouched by human hands for more than a quarter century, except for the East German guards. It was the one place that made me an equal to my friends and classmates for, like them, it was a place I could never visit, unlike the other side of the Wall. 

As we silently observed the scene before us, we spotted people waving. They were atop bleachers that were erected on the West side of the Wall along the same bisected street we now stood, Unter den Linden. The bleachers allowed West Berliners and tourists to view Brandenburg Plaza and the city behind the Wall, which at this very moment in time included us. The anonymous people on the other end kept waving, expecting us to reciprocate. Instead they received blank stares.  

It was at this moment, that I fully understood the fate of my friends. They could never see Berlin from the vantage point of the anonymous people across the way. They were forever stuck in the city behind us, forced only to dream of the city in front of us, the city they could see, the city they could hear, the city they could smell, the city where they could even communicate with its people through a simple wave. It was then that I determined this spot, the most historic in all of Berlin, both East and West, was in fact the cruelest of all.