Two Berlins in One Afternoon: A Cold War Walk

The train was called the Frankfurter Ring, and I was pleased with myself for finding it. It would take a while from Wedding, but I was going to see East Berlin. What had the city actually been like when it was cut in two? How did people live it, and how did they cross, and were they even allowed to? I had been in Berlin a few days by then and was already half looking for reasons to move there — the street art and the alternative side of the city had done their work, and now I wanted the history and the architecture.

So I booked a walking tour about the division, run by a docent from Context Travel — they are all PhDs or specialists in their field — and arranged to meet at Frankfurter Allee.

The wrong Frankfurter

Frankfurter Ring, it turns out, is not Frankfurter Allee. I worked this out on the platform, did the arithmetic on walking versus being late, and concluded that walking was hopeless. Another U-Bahn, then. When I came up the steps, the Frankfurter Tor was directly in front of me, which felt like an apology from the city.

It is enormous, and unlike most of the buildings I had seen in Berlin. The Tor sits on Karl-Marx-Allee, and Lucia, our guide, explained that this was the centre of East Berlin under the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic. The two towers flanking the road really do read as a gate into the eastern half of the city.

Worker palaces in wedding-cake style

Walking east along the boulevard, I noticed the same tone repeating: high ceilings, tiled facades, shared balconies on the residential blocks. This was socialist architecture, and the housing has been called worker palaces in wedding-cake style — tall, tiled, and very like what was being built across the Soviet Union.

This stretch was intended as a showcase. It was where people were meant to shop, where the flats were a cut above the rest, and where the prestige buildings went up: Cafe Moskau, with a full-size replica of the Sputnik satellite, the Kino International, the Kosmos. The television tower at Alexanderplatz stays in view most of the way.

I had assumed Alexanderplatz was the centre of Berlin. It is a centre, not the centre. A city this size has several squares that matter, and Alexanderplatz is one of the busiest rather than the only one. Further along, near the square, I was glad to find the Nikolaisviertel, which a friend had told me about — it is said to be where the city began.

Crossing to the west

From there we took the S-Bahn across the city to the Hansaviertel, the centre of West Berlin. After the Second World War a group of prominent international architects was invited to build here, and they were given creative freedom rather than a party line. The result was meant to carry a message: freedom, independence, a Western capitalist society, expressed in concrete and glass.

We walked through the Tiergarten, the vast park at the middle of the city, while Lucia talked about the architecture and politics of the western half. Berlin has twelve districts, and what struck me is how self-contained each one is — its own markets, its own stations, its own places to eat. You could live a whole life inside one of them.

Somewhere in that area we kept seeing the number 6. On it, everywhere. The day before, I had heard about an artist who paints the number 6 on walls across Berlin, so naturally my mind went there. It was probably the work of local children, but it started a long conversation about street art and the people who make it.

The tour finished at the Academy of Art in the Hansaviertel, a short walk from Bellevue station.

Which side was better?

I could not answer that, and I don't think the tour was trying to. Some people who lived in the East liked the model they were given and still speak of it with affection. Some in the West were content with their own ideology and values. Both things can be true of the same city in the same decade.

One detail that reorganised my sense of the period: when the city was first divided, there was no Wall. It came later, in 1961. The division existed as a line on a map and a set of restrictions long before it existed as concrete.

Pieces of the Wall still stand. One stretch runs close to Berlin Ost Hauptbahnhof. It is hard to look at it and not think about the people who were shot trying to get over it. Outside the tour, I went to Checkpoint Charlie, the official crossing between the two Berlins, and stood there for a while. I had a great many questions. Lucia took all of them, from all of us, and answered them patiently.

On taking a guided tour at all

Most cities have walking tours, and most of them are fine for an overview before you set off on your own. If you want something more particular — the history, the culture, the architecture, explained by someone who studies it — a specialist outfit is worth the money. Context Travel runs tours in Europe, Asia and America, and this one changed how I read the city afterwards.

I was a guest on the tour, and the opinions here are my own.