Scaling the Berlin Wall

Tom Stoddart / Getty Images As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, journalist Michael Meyer looks back at the years he spent astride it. An exclusive excerpt from The Year the World Changed.

Arriving in Berlin, I would do what I always did: Drop my luggage at the hotel and hail a taxi toward the East. I went to touch the Wall, to lay hands upon it. It didn’t matter how many times I had done it before, or how many times I would do so again. It was my lodestone, my centering point, my story as a journalist covering Germany and the East Bloc.

Nothing has ever been so freighted with symbolism, ideology, and history. The Wall was World War II, the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the high tide of totalitarianism and communist dictatorship, the frontier of democracy. You could feel it, smell it, run your hands over it, look across it. On the one side, us. On the other, them.

The Wall’s scar has been replanted. Dig in the sandy soil, and you find broken pieces of its distinctive concrete. The Wall abides like a phantom limb, a void that cannot be forgotten.

It didn’t matter what direction you took. Berlin was an island; all paths led to the Wall. Usually I went down Bismarck Strasse, past the Siegessäule, the winged column celebrating Prussia’s victory in the 1871 war against France, to the Reichstag. The Wall cut a few feet behind the old parliament, still blackened and pockmarked from flying debris from the war. A dozen crosses memorialized a few who died there trying to escape. An East German patrol boat, with spotlights and heavy machine guns, idled on the far shore of the River Spree. Only a few weeks before my first visit, a young man was gunned down near the spot and left to bleed to death where he lay.

The Year the World Changed: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall. By Michael Meyer. 272 pages. Scribner. $26. Usually I would walk south, along the Wall past the Brandenburg Gate, across the muddy and eerily empty lots around Potsdamer Platz, the heart of old Berlin, once crowded with hotels and department stores and so busy in the 1920s that it received Europe’s first traffic light. Hitler’s bunker lay there in the death strip, a swelling breast of earth easily glimpsed from a spectator platform, illuminated by harsh security lights at night and girded with antitank traps. Farther along was Wilhelm Strasse and the weed-grown rubble of the Nazi SS headquarters, then after a series of sharp zigs and zags down abandoned and often broken streets came Checkpoint Charlie. YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR a large sign warned in English, French and Russian, beyond which the green-uniformed Vopos—Volkspolizei— of the German Democratic Republic waited behind their barriers and barbed wire. The view stretched all the way to Moscow.

Ronald Reagan spoke for many, but it was hard to imagine the world without the Wall. Perhaps it was the touching. The Wall was so obdurate and outwardly solid. Its blunt, crude force, so hostile to movement, heart, and spirit, had become a fact of life—regrettable and tragic, to be sure, but there, like cancer or the reality of evil in the world.

• More Daily Beast takes on the Berlin Wall anniversaryIn Berlin, the Wall was felt everywhere, even when not in sight. It haunts the city to this day, 20 years later. Eerie remnants remain, catching one unaware: a stretch of Wall here, a watchtower there, vacant lots where the death strip passed, a thin line of paving stones inlaid in the streets of the city’s center, marked with bronze plates: BERLIN MAUER: 1961–1989. In the forested parts of Berlin, away from the now trendy Mitte, or city center, you may notice a steady march of pines through stands of birch and elder. The Wall’s scar has been replanted. Dig in the sandy soil, and you find broken pieces of its distinctive concrete. The Wall abides like a phantom limb, a void that cannot be forgotten.

There is a misplaced sentimentality to these memories, a sort of Cold War romance, a thrill for a certain kind of tourist. Berliners for the most part simply lived with it, incongruous and sinister as it was. To live with something is to become oblivious. Mothers pushed their prams along it. In the western half of the city, artists painted it, at least for a time. But generally people turned their backs on it, except when seeking empty spaces to park their cars.