Crossing The Berlin Wall

Imagine getting a new job, moving into a new apartment and spending just one last night in your old apartment only to wake up in the morning to find you have been barricaded in by a barbed wire fence with no way in or out. You have no access to your job or belongings. No access to your new life. Trapped behind the Berlin Wall. This is what happened to Günter Litfin on the 13th August 1961, the day the Berlin Wall went up. Eleven days later he attempted to cross into West Berlin by swimming across the River Spree. He was shot by East Berlin border guards and drowned.

However, Günter Litfin wasn’t the first casualty of the Berlin Wall. There was one death before his, that of Ida Siekmann who jumped out of her East Berlin apartment window. She landed in West Berlin but died shortly after. It was attempts like hers which lead to the demolition of apartments lining the wall and the creation of the ‘death strip’, a strip of vacant land in front of the wall guarded by East Berlin border guards.

Also demolished was the Church of Reconciliation in the Mitte district of Berlin. After the fall of the wall, the church was replaced with the Chapel of Reconciliation and is part of the Berlin Wall Memorial near former ghost station Berlin Nordbahnhof.

Stations like Berlin Nordbahnhof became ghost stations as they were bordered up by the East Berlin authorities. You could take the S-Bahn in West Berlin and ride through the closed East Berlin stations, where the doors never opened, and then get out at the other side back in West Berlin.

One of the few legal East/West Berlin crossing points was at the Friedrichstrasse train station in a specially built building known as the Palace of Tears, named for the tearful farewells of those unable to cross the border. The Palace of Tears is now a museum where you can see the border crossing and find out about life in divided Germany or watch a propaganda video!

We finished the tour at the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of East Berlin and the site of the famous footage from the 9th November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.

Here is a video of the tour I was on with our very passionate guide, Julian. The sound isn’t that great but I do make a very brief appearance so it’s worth watching. ;)

The city tours offered by Context Travel (my tour was complimentary) are based on an interesting concept where they have historians and academics give unique walking seminars in small groups. They are designed for, in their words, ‘intellectually curious’ travellers and their 3 hour tours give an in-depth view of a unique aspect of the city. I’ve never been on a tour like this before and it was fascinating to learn so many details about the Berlin Wall which I never would have discovered otherwise. I’m looking forward to taking part in two more Context tours next month, one is an evening tour of Rome and the other a drawing class and visit of Castel Sant'Angelo.