Grainy images of people streaming over Berlin’s Wall moved me to tears
Some of the installations were incomprehensible, but the spirit of the night was something I’ll never forget. Peaceful protest aside, Leipzig boasts several superlatives. The pristine central train station is Europe’s largest and the museum above popular Zum Arabische Coffe Baum, one of the continent’s oldest coffee houses, is also worth a visit. The university, dating to 1409, is the second oldest in Germany.
I was disappointed not to have more time to stroll around the lovely centuries-old shopping arcades and courtyards. But, of necessity, politics took precedence. In Leipzig’s Forum of Contemporary History, Dr Sebastian Fink steered us through the posters, displays, photos and videos evoking life in the Soviet-controlled GDR from the end of World War II until the Wall fell 44 years later.
Fascinating exhibits include the no-choice ballot papers of 1950 to a typical living room in a Communist block of flats. I was shocked to hear that all East German typewriters had to be registered – until I recalled the plot in The Lives of Others.
Dr Fink explained how the GDR authorities provided kindergartens, laundries and hairdressers in factories so women would work there. And how so many people rode motorbikes because it took 14 years to get a car from the date you ordered it. Not so long ago, and not so far away either, but an utterly alien existence.
Outside the Forum, I copy the pose of The Step of the Century sculpture for a photograph. But the open-handed salute feels uncomfortably like the Nazi variety so I simply replicate the step forward instead.
I later read that artist Wolfgang Mattheuer meant that gesture to represent Fascism, together with the closed-fist anger of the oppressed worker – and with his statue’s long legs stepping for- ward from the tyranny of both. After a quick spin to the shop selling typical East German items, we bade farewell to Leipzig via the Runden Ecke ‘Round Corner’ Museum, where the secret police headquartered for four decades.
While explanations are in German, boxes of intercepted letters, surveillance equipment and a cabinet of Stasi wigs and false noses conveyed the message very clearly.
Did Leipzigers perhaps take consolation from the fact that their city wasn’t haphazardly and cruelly divided, like Berlin? I very much doubt it. Berlin’s main Wall Memorial is on Bernauer Strasse, where people looked on in horror as East German soldiers
bricked up their windows and doors.
Ida Siekmann was the first casualty of this madness, fatally injured on August 22, 1989, after leaping from her apartment before West German firefighters could catch her in a protective sheet.
Rather than the bent girders, various bits of Wall and a watchtower, however, visitors are instantly drawn to the Window of Remembrance photographs of those who died trying to defect, including 15-month-old Holger H.
On January 22, 1973 his mother, Ingrid, held his mouth closed when he began to cry at Checkpoint Bravo – not realising he had a bronchial infection and couldn’t breathe through his nose.
Today Chancellor Angela Merkel will open the new Documentation Centre exhibition at Bernauer Strasse, honouring the tragedy of those lost lives.
More compelling still is former Stasi remand prison Gedenkstatte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen in the north-eastern outskirts.
Press officer Andre Kockisch
showed us a dungeon-like cell in the Russian part, nicknamed the U-Boot, or submarine, where post-war prisoners were held 10 to a bed in squalor.
The newly founded Stasi took over the jail in 1950, using sleep deprivation and other classic forms of mental torture to extract confessions. It’s weird that the rows of interrogation rooms – the prison features in The Lives of Others – look so harmless now, almost like part of a television set for a bad 1970s office sitcom.
After Hohenschonhausen the compact Cold War exhibition in the Black Box beside Checkpoint Charlie took far less of a toll, though the grainy black-andwhite footage of Bernauer Strasse being blocked off plus the grainy colour videos of people streaming over the Wall 28 years later moved me to tears again, albeit briefly.
A quarter of a century on, Berlin has come a seriously long way.
Today’s German capital is a vibrant sprawling flowchart, needing careful planning to negotiate. The trusty tour bus is good for a recce mission, or there’s always bike hire (www. berlinonbike/de/en).
Two neighbourhoods not to be missed are the Jewish quarter, where the buzzing Art Nouveau courtyards of Hackesche Hofe are a delight, and friendly Prenzlauer Berg, arty but unpretentious.
Most visitors to Berlin will make their way at some point to bustling Kurfurstendammen for a spot of shopping and socialising. Top sights are few and far between, and at first you might be unimpressed by the boxy modern replacement built beside the blitzed 18th-century Kaiser Wilhelm ‘hollow tooth’ Memorial Church.
Once inside, however, the blue light from its glass bricks is truly amazing. So plan as much as you like, but just remember that Berlin will always have the ability to surprise.