Berlin is still divided

Berlin at night. Img: Chris Hadfield on board the ISS. NASA/ESA

Whenever I agree to speak about East Germany in Berlin, I know things will get heated. Perhaps that’s not surprising given that Berlin straddled the world’s political fault lines for nearly half a century during the Cold War. It’s also the capital of a nation suspended in a permanent state of renegotiation of its own past.

So when Die Tageszeitung or taz invited me to their annual ‘lab’ – a one-day conference on a specific topic – I was under no illusions that it would be any less intense. The theme this year was the East, and I was to discuss whether a new history of the GDR was needed. 

Maybe it was just my mindset because I knew what I was in Berlin for, but my trip seemed to be overshadowed by the idea of division from the start. I took an evening flight, and when I landed in Berlin, I typed the name of my hotel into Google and let the American tech giant tell me where it was, which trains to take and from which platform.

Smartphones have transformed travel. I can barely remember the days when I used to get travel guides and maps, carefully marking the address of a hotel on it and planning train and bus routes to the location. Here I was, rushing down the stairs at Berlin airport with my phone in my hand, fully trusting it to know the platform number, live arrival time of the train and even how busy it would be (less than usual). 

I blindly followed the instructions, not thinking about where I was until I arrived at Friedrichstraße Station. Today, it is a busy place in central Berlin, a station almost every visitor to the city will use at some point. People bustle about freely switching between trains above ground and underground, between local traffic and connections to far away places. But this wasn’t always so. 

During the Cold War, Friedrichstraße Station was in East Berlin. But when the city’s public transport was first developed, it hadn’t been designed to be divided. There was no easy way to disentangle the train system and cut it neatly into East and West. So Friedrichstraße continued to be used by trains arriving from West Berlin. Western passengers could travel through it to other places such as Vienna or Prague or get off and cross into East Berlin on a visa. 

For East Germans, the station was part of their local transport network. Their trains also arrived and departed here but didn’t go to West Berlin. With the East German regime forcing people to stay in the GDR, a way was found to ensure East and West Germans could use the same station without intermixing or Easterners being able to board a train to the West. Walls divided the groups who used different platforms inaccessible to each other. For those wanting to cross from one ideological world to another, a steel-and-glass extension had been built where visas, passports and permissions were checked before people traversed the fault lines of the Cold War. Due to the frequent tearful scenes of East Germans saying goodbye to their relatives, friends and lovers here, the place became known as the Palace of Tears. 

It was strange to stand there now on the train platform with my phone telling me that I should take an U-Bahn train crossing from what was once East Berlin into West Berlin. No more passports, permissions, armed guards, socialism or tears. Just a 7-minute train ride. 

As the Berlin night air felt pleasantly mild after the recent cold snap in England, I decided to walk instead.