After discussing the media’s coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent German reunification, I thought it’d be interesting to explore my own perspective on the current state of Berlin after 20 years of reunification.
“Asking if the unification of Germany was ‘complete’ is the wrong question; a marriage is only ‘complete’ after both spouses pass away, so we should be asking if the unification is ‘successful’ instead.” ~ Graf Lambsdorff, German Consul General
German reunification is undoubtedly successful given the scale of the task and the divisive nature of its history. But in an everyday setting, Berlin does feel a little odd – an odd mix of democratic socialism in the hollowed out shell of communism. Every weekday morning that I had class would start with waking up in my little Soviet-built apartment at seven in the morning. Then, I’d ride my little scooter out west…way west…on the huge 8-lane Karl-Marx Allee to Alexanderplatz to get to class.
Alexanderplatz was easy, it used to be part of the east so the roads connected reasonably well. However, I’d usually park the bike there and take the S-Bahn if I wanted to go into former West Berlin. You see, the Straße des 19 Juli is a wide boulevard leading to the west, but the former Berlin Wall just meant that the roads usually ran north-south (parallel) along the border instead of east-west (across) the border. As a result, the Bundesstraße number 1 funnels into a small two-lane alley just as you cross the border. The traffic at this bottleneck is inconvenient to say the least.
In the evenings, you will see the streetlights change from a fluorescent white beam in the west to an incandescent orange glow in the east. The lean man at pedestrian signals in the west turn into a stout man with a hat in the east. Beautiful altbau houses with gabled roofs in the west contrast with the monolithic plattenbau of the east. The Berlin tramway system inconveniently cuts off along the former border. Friedrichstraße station (a former checkpoint) remains asymmetrical and changing trains feels like walking through a corn maze. As an everyday resident, it feels a little incongruous and I found it difficult to reconcile the differences between east and west.
Sure, the old Soviet-style buildings are repainted and well-maintained in the tourist areas around the museum island and Alexanderplatz, but the further east you travel, the more real it feels. Go to Hönow, Ahrensfelde, or Strausberg to see the old dilapidated state of communist housing estates and visit the the tiny grocery stores that used to be former Kaufhalles where citizens obtained their rations.
Yeah, the wall is down, but there still seems to be this invisible barrier. An architectural barrier, a transportation barrier that still makes crossing over difficult, an infrastructure barrier that makes the tap water taste different, an economic barrier where all the rough neighbourhoods are in the east, and a psychological barrier where speaking with an Ossi accent will lead to discrimination.
