The first item on most people’s Berlin bucket list is of course the Wall.  For the first 30 years of my life, Berlin, Germany and Europe were divided into East and West.  I never knew anything different; we just accepted it as an unfortunate fact of life.  I vaguely knew that it had something to do with post-war Communism, and that it made travel to large chunks of Europe very difficult.  Then in the late 1980s, as the economic situation deteriorated in Soviet bloc countries, things started to change.  We woke up one morning in 1989 to learn that the Wall had come down, East Berliners had flooded across in their hundreds of thousands, and the divide between East and West was effectively no more.

There is not much left of the Wall nowadays.  Berlin has had to tread a fine line between removing all traces of a past no-one wants to be reminded of, and preserving a part of history that no-one can ever forget.  They have done it quite well with the Mauer Weg, or Wall Trail, which you can follow for about 6 kms.  There was actually an inner and an outer wall, with no man’s land in between.

The Trail starts with the East Side Gallery along the bank of the Spree River, at 1.3 kms the longest surviving stretch of the inner wall still standing.  In 1990, artists from all over the world decorated this section with colourful and striking paintings, many of them political.  They are fighting an uphill battle with graffiti, and some sections have been fenced off.  You can see how the wall was built straight across the rail line and Oberbaumbrucke (bridge), literally cutting major transport routes within the city overnight.

From here, the location of the Wall is mostly marked only by cobblestones in the road.  There are a number of monuments and information boards as the route wriggles through quiet streets, past churches and alongside canals and parks. It was fascinating to stand in the middle of a residential street and realise that one side was East and the other was West – and it wasn’t necessarily apparent from the building styles.

Along Zimmerstrasse you find a memorial to Peter Fechter, an 18 year old who attempted to cross the Wall with a friend in 1962.  The friend made it, but Peter was shot and lay bleeding to death for an hour before being carried away by GDR guards.  A little further along is the site of the infamous Checkpoint Charlie¸ complete with replica boom gate and signs indicating which side of the city you are on (the US side has a Maccas and a KFC right there so there’s not much doubt).  You can stand on the line of cobbles marking the wall at this busy intersection, and imagine being so arbitrarily separated from friends and family.

At Niederkirchnerstrasse there is a preserved section of the outer wall, and you can get a really good idea of its thickness and composition.  There was certainly no craftsmanship involved – just slap up some reinforced concrete as fast as possible.  And of course souvenir hunters have hammered and chiselled away at it for decades.

The Topography of Terror exhibition is stark and sombre.  It is on the site of former Gestapo headquarters, and you can see remnants of the hated buildings, which were torn down in the 1950s.  The display traces the rise of Hitler, and the war.  It was sometimes difficult to read and did not gloss over what happened during that appalling period.

The Wall trail took us to Potsdamer Platz, now a glitzy shopping district.  It continued north for several more kilometres, but we left that for another day.