The Wall

The Wall was still standing when I last visited Berlin, so I’m looking forward to this experience of a reunified and reborn great city. I remember far more from that short time spent in East Berlin than I do from visiting the Western part of the city. I suppose that had much to do with the cultural shock once I’d passed Checkpoint Charlie. Though I’d traveled to Communist Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia prior to this, there was something about the cold starkness of the transition of stepping through a man-made barrier and entering such a different world. The people were the same but they were oh, so different. And the sky was always completely overcast. I don’t remember a single day spent in a Communist country that the sun ever broke through the cloud cover. Even on the short jaunt from West to East Berlin the sun retired completely.

East Berlin was gray, brown, and beige. The Wall, so full of colorful graffiti on one side, was blank and dreary on the other. East Berliners never smiled as they stoically went about their day, avoiding eye contact. Maybe this was because an obvious Westerner was approaching, but it was most likely for fear of Stasi reprisal. I imagine they kept to themselves as well because in a political system built on such control of the individual, the only respite was to live in a separate world that only you, the individual, could envisage and inhabit inside your own mind.

But East Berlin was clean. I give it that. No rubbish, no homeless, no clutter. And very, very beige. The clothing was indistinct, the buildings were uniform, and the cars all looked the same. There were stores that just sold toothbrushes, others offering Soviet watches, and sidewalk vendors selling only brown socks. Together in blandness seemed to be the mantra.

The only item I bought was a Soviet watch that stopped working exactly three days later.

As I crossed back to the West I made a point of leaving my own distinctly personal mark on the Wall, one that made clear what I thought of the East. I have no idea where that part of the Wall is today, but I do feel a special bond with a historic piece of concrete put up in the middle of the night in a very different time in a very different place not so long ago.