Checkpoint Charlie
 

Let us not forget to commemorate Checkpoint Charlie - removed 20 years ago today.

Best museum in Germany. And as of the last time I was there, it was the most popular one in Berlin and received no gov't. funding. I crossed Checkpoint Charlie a few times when it was still active. Very eery, but a lot more civilized than crossing the inner German border in other areas.

I crossed checkpoint charlie, and it actually was a much more civilized experience than the one you are getting coming into the US at JFK nowadays.

I saw a great series of photos that showed almost hour-by-hour how the Berlin Wall was assembled. Freakiest damn thing when you see how such a symbol between Us and Them was built with shovels, concrete, cement mixers, and human labor, all in a couple days. People were strolling back and forth as the wall was being built. Crazy.

I crossed Checkpoint Charlie as well. I had posted a thread last November of me bashing on the Wall.

My dear friends who live near Halle (former E. Germany) planned to escape to W. Berlin the weekend the Wall went up. It was a Sunday morning and once they'd heard on the radio what happened, they stayed home. Most of the escapes happened in the first years of the Wall, before it got real fortified and technical. The later ones were super daring and very risky. Several border guards were later prosecuted for shooting defectors once the country was unified. Kinda crazy that another country can prosecute you for stuff you did under orders in your own country when it was a sovereign country. W. Germany always had the attitude that it was the only legitimate Germany.

The last person to be shot trying to get over the Wall was killed February 1989....

I was first there in June 1988 and in Halle in July 1989. At that time there was absolutely no sign of the DDR collapsing. The Monday night prostests in Leipzig were just beginning, but were not reported. While I was there they implemented the requirement for DDR citizens to get a visa to visit Hungary, which had just removed their fence with Austria in May. I took a train to Austria from Leipzig and we ended up driving to Hungary via Vienna. We could see abandoned Trabants on the side of the road and people wandering through the fields into Austria. Such history.

Tear down the Wall!

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Amazing times - I was living in Berlin then and even though I knew history was in the making it took a while for the magnitude to sink in. Was at the Brandenburg Gate for both the first New Year (Silvester) and October Wiedervereinigung. Even today it seems surreal.

Right after the wall fell I went to Bauhaus to get a good chisel. Behind the Reichstag I was working doing my bit to dismantle the thing and locals would come up and ask for pieces. I finally got to where I would give them the hammer and chisel along with "selbst bedienung" (self-service). They would grin, take a few whacks of revenge and then get their pictures taken with the hammer and wall.

Both partitions considered themselves to be the "only" Germany. I remember following a road sign to Berlin while in Potsdam - seemed to be a strange routing but that happens. The routing was to East Berlin, southerly around the non-existent West Berlin.

So many memories...

I wonder if anyone here had been to E. Germany before the wall fell. I'd be fascinated to see the differences in technology and advancement between East and West Berlin.

I've heard E. Berlin was anything from idyllic to an all-out slum.

Oh -

One of the pieces of the wall I still have has a very odd looking aggregate in the concrete. It's a very special piece for me, and people are really taken aback when I let them hold it and explain that what they are seeing is the brick and stone of the homes and businesses that were bulldozed and ground up to make the concrete for the wall. Humans can be so stupid and so cruel to each other - all for dogma.

I doubt we will ever learn.

Even when I was there at the end, crossing into East Germany was still surreal. You go from this colorful area to a place that is sooty and gray. The Trabants were painted, but the colors resembled the colors from the 50's and flat. The one thing that stood out, were some of the store fronts. They had access to incredible crystal and china from Czech. Beautiful pieces in contrast with the surroundings.

Yeah, many were killed evidently trying to cross.

Here's one of the more famous deaths:

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Peter Fechter (January 14, 1944 – August 17, 1962) was a German bricklayer from East Berlin in what became East Germany in 1945, who, at the age of eighteen, became one of the first victims of the Berlin Wall's border guards while trying to cross over to what was then West Berlin.

Fechter supposedly was shot in the hip, stumbled into the barbed wire, became entangled and bled to death while both American and German/Soviet soldiers had a standoff as to who would help him.

Yes, East Germany, USSR, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia.... The Soviets punished the Germans by making them live in the rubble of the war.

Right behind the Reichstag is a very interesting building. My wife and I were looking at it (looked like the last shot was fired just an hour before) when an East German gent and his son asked us if we knew the history of the building. No.... Turns out it is where Dr. Koch discovered the cause of tuberculosis.

The cities were a mess.

Footnote: We became good friends with the family I mentioned above. Went sailing with them on Scharmuetzelsee at a time when Americans were complete unknowns. Delightful people. We visit them on every trip to Berlin and they have stayed with us to see the Decadent West.

Homes and businesses bulldozed for the concrete and in the wake, beautiful crystal. Unbelievable...

So has it cleaned up a bit in the East or is it still Third World?

Also, I heard the West Germans were sorely pissed after the wall fell because the East Germans were coming in and taking all the employment -- for much less pay.

I did. It was very different than the west. It was like going from a color movie (West Berlin) into a black and white one.
They had not really accomplished the shrinking of electronics and their portable radios were big as lunch boxes. There were shortages of most things...but a dollar would buy a lot.

Things are a lot different. I have East German relatives. A cousin is actually here in the states now, working for HP. In 2007, when I was last in Germany, I was finally able to meet more of my East German family. They all drive BMW's and Merc's. :)

Yes, the W. Germans were not happy when the first waves from the East came over. But at the same time, it was a struggle, because families were finally reunited. Today, it is business as usual.

Yes, everything is changing. The joke is that the official bird of Berlin is the Crane (as in construction crane).

The Ossi/Wessi (Ossi = East German; Wessi = West German) divide is very complex and, in some ways, greater than when the physical wall was there. The East Germans to some degree look at their years behind the wall as imprisonment and they deserve to be made whole. The West Germans to some degree have the attitude that they worked for everything they have so the Ossis can do the same.

One problem is very similar to our experience after WWII; rebuilding the devastated West German economy gave them much more state-of-the-art infrastructure than what we had. Same thing is happening to the East - and is being done with West German money. Also, the East Mark was exchanged 1:1 for the West Mark. As I recall, the fair market rate was really 16:1. I remember having tea with an East German who held his new money and very emotionally expressed disbelief that he was holding something that actually had value. That exchange resulted in inflation which, for the Germans, is very unwelcome given the memories of the 1930s.

The other, rather tragic, problem that divides East/West is that the East was so far behind in their education and business practices that the West German gov't made the decision that people over (I think it was 50) didn't have enough working life left in them to be worth the investment in retraining. This has built a whole generation of throw-aways. Imagine the problems.

Things are decidedly better, and aside from the massive amounts of graffiti that Berlin is now experiencing, the divide is difficult for an outsider to discern. It is, however, there. It will take time for the divide to disappear.