
Where the wall once stood - mpweiher
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/themen/berlinergeschichte/zirkeltag-in-berlin-wo-frueher-die-mauer-stand-ein-vorher-nachher-vergleich/20921224.html
======
f_allwein
missing the most famous view of the wall, next to Brandenburg Gate:
[https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Wall-at-the-
Brande...](https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Wall-at-the-Brandenburg-
Gate/1)

Background: today is the day the Berlin wall has been down for as long as it
has been up - [http://nationalpost.com/news/the-berlin-wall-has-almost-
been...](http://nationalpost.com/news/the-berlin-wall-has-almost-been-down-as-
long-as-it-was-up)

~~~
salmonfamine
I think I stood in almost that exact spot a few months ago during a trip to
Europe. Crazy to think that there used to be a border there.

------
peterjmag
Berliner Morgenpost published a cool little interactive thing last week where
you draw where you think the wall used to be and it tells you how close you
were:

[https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/berliner-
mauer/](https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/berliner-mauer/)

(German only, but the headline basically just means "do you know where where
the wall divided Berlin?")

I've lived here for a few years, but I found it really challenging myself!

~~~
peterjmag
Ah, and they just published some of the resulting drawings:

[https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/mauerzeichnen-
auswertung/](https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/mauerzeichnen-auswertung/)

~~~
kiddico
The most absurd list is exactly what I was hoping they would have

------
coroxout
Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice to
see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well looked
after.

Must have been so weird to look out from a high-up apartment on one side of
the wall all the way over no-man's-land towards the windows of another block
on the other side.

~~~
liotier
> Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice
> to see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well
> looked after.

Have you seen many cities where buildings that are merely 30 years old do not
exist anymore ?

~~~
cannam
The situation with older buildings in central Berlin is quite interesting
though, because so many quite grand buildings on the eastern side went
untouched for 50 years after the war. Then in the late 90s large areas of
east-central Berlin were restored at some speed, from bullet-holed crumbling
blackened stone to smart painted render in what I assume was something like
the original style.

I once wrote a rather personal ramble that touches on this, here
[https://thebreakfastpost.com/2014/09/23/alte-schonhauser-
str...](https://thebreakfastpost.com/2014/09/23/alte-schonhauser-strase/) with
some pictures taken in 1993 of the area around Hackescher Markt. If you click
through on one of the photos, there are a few more on the Flickr set that
don't appear in the article.

~~~
et-al
Thanks for sharing those photos. It's crazy how long Tacheles was in ruins. I
was just there in January and there's actually construction breaking ground.

When's the last time you were back in Berlin? Have you seen how Neue
Schönhauser Str. has developed?

------
DoreenMichele
FYI: The photos are not "side by side." They scroll over to see before and
after views.

I didn't immediately realize it. My German is lousy. Etc.

~~~
majewsky
Same for me, although I speak (and am) German. I just thought, "it would be
nice if you could move this... oh look, you actually can".

------
_Microft
Former canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took a famous picture from the
Internation Space Station that shows how it is still possible to see where the
wall separated the city!

Check this:
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/apr/21/astr...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/apr/21/astronaut-
chris-hadfield-berlin-divide)

Pretty awesome, in my opinion :)

~~~
ygra
This is mostly because street lighting was different. Sodium vapour lamps in
the East, mercury-vapour (or perhaps high-pressure sodium-vapour) lamps in the
West.

~~~
_Microft
Yes, that's exactly the explanation!

------
skrause
Seems like the wall of concrete has been replaced by a wall of parked cars.

~~~
azernik
For a very good reason - if you look at the old pictures, you'll often see the
pre-1961 sidewalk embedded in the street. The Wall was often build in the
middle of streets that had been used as demarcation lines between Soviet and
other zones. When the wall came back down, those streets were rebuilt, and so
car parking went down exactly along the route of the wall.

You can see this by looking at the ground; modern Berlin marks the route of
the wall with a line of bricks in the middle of the pavement. In many of the
current pictures, that line runs just between the traffic lanes and the parked
cars.

------
fergie
Its amazing how much nicer most European cities have become since the '80s.
The wall was one thing, but the general crime, grime and sense of decay was
almost as bad.

~~~
woodpanel
Absolutely. The decay was grim. Take Leipzig for example, once one of the
trade centers of Germany and what it became after 40 years of socialism:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cDOqb53Kfk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cDOqb53Kfk)
[1]

And mind you, that when we're speaking about Eastern Europe, we're talking
about the more prosperous part of the communist bloc.

[1] granted, WW2 left its mark as well but Western Germany started with the
same handicap and didn't turn it's inner cities into Favelas.

~~~
majewsky
> Western Germany started with the same handicap

It depends. Some counter-points:

\- Western Germany had all (or at least nearly all) of Germany's supply of
black coal, the energy source that powered nearly all of Germany back in the
day. East Germany only had brown coal, which has a worse energy density and is
more complicated to mine and use e.g. because of the water contained in it.
Over the lifespan of the GDR, about 40% of all investments in industry went
into the energy sector as they tried to make brown coal more efficient and
build nuclear reactors.

\- While the Western allies realized fairly early on that it makes more sense
for them to integrate West Germany into their political and economical
networks, East Germany had to pay huge amounts of reparations to the Soviets.
Entire factories and hundreds of kilometers of rail tracks were disassembled
and shipped to Russia. [1] That also took decades to recover from.

[1] While motivated by an understandable desire for a payback on the part of
the Soviets (who suffered millions of casualties during the war), this was an
incredibly stupid move for the Soviets: A lot of those reparations got lost to
their "brother countries" through which stuff was shipped to the Soviet Union,
and when machines managed to arrive in the Soviet Union, they often lacked
qualified personnel to operate them. And, of course, it also reduced
competitiveness of the GDR (and, therefore, of the Communist bloc as a whole).

~~~
Sharlin
Wow. Finland (which didn’t get occupied and remained nominally neutral) also
had to pay hefty war reparations (mostly in the form of heavy machinery) but
that had an almost opposite effect: they kickstarted rapid industrialization
and economic growth in the hitherto poor, largely agrarian country.

~~~
refurb
Nominally neutral? They fought the Soviets in alliance with the Nazis! It
wasn't until the end of the Winter war they switched sides.

~~~
danielvf
Finland was neutral before, and only worked with Germany after a massive,
unprovoked military invasion by Russia and essentially no help from the allies
during the entire Winter War.

------
woodpanel
I've seen so many pictures of the wall in my life, yet I can't remember seeing
even one taken from the eastern side. Probably because it would have landed
you in jail?

~~~
FabHK
So, two things:

1\. The wall was all around West Berlin, separating it from East Berlin and
the rest of East Germany.

2\. There was a whole wide border defence strip, known as the death strip.
_The_ wall was just the inner most ("western") part of it. From West Berlin
you could walk right up to it (though sometimes there was a thin strip of East
Berlin strictly speaking), but on the outer ("eastern") side there was the
considerable "defence in depth" and guards and fences etc. Basically, if you
ever stood in front of _the_ wall on the "eastern" side, you were either a
border guard or about to be shot.

See pictures here:

[https://allymalinenko.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/wall001.jp...](https://allymalinenko.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/wall001.jpg)

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_B_145_...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_B_145_Bild-P061246.jpg)

[http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/berliner-mauer-der-
geharkt...](http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/berliner-mauer-der-geharkte-
todesstreifen/1627392.html)

EDIT to add:

3\. Similarly, there was a 1400 km border between East and West Germany, which
was also heavily guarded. It also had a border defence strip on the eastern
side, up to 5 km (3 miles) wide, which incidentally turned it into a habitat
for endangered species. While this "innerdeutsche Grenze" is less unusual and
thus less famous than the Berlin Wall, more people died trying to cross it
than at the Wall.

4\. The crossings at that border were the stuff of spy movies: East Germany
actually installed secret gamma-ray guns to detect people concealed inside
vehicles. If someone arose suspicion and tried to flee with their car, there
were 6 ton barriers, "Kraftfahrzeugschnellsperren", that could be catapulted
across the road using hydraulic rams.

~~~
azag0
> though sometimes there was a thin strip of East Berlin strictly speaking

There were also secret doors in the wall, and on several occasion people from
the western part who ended up on this thin strip adjacent to the wall were
"kidnapped" by the stasi to the east and later usually traded for eastern
agents captured in the west.

------
oneeyedpigeon
Are there no intact bits remaining? Last time I was in Berlin (maybe 10-15
years ago) there were a few places around the city where small sections still
stood.

~~~
hjkm
Yes, in some parts of the city the wall is still there. In other parts, like
where I live, iron beams stick out from the floor to show where the wall used
to be. And in other parts, you can't see anything (though you usually don't
have to walk far to see some wall-related artwork painted on a wall or
something like that)

~~~
azag0
Is this around Bernauer Str or also somewhere else? I've only ever seen it
there.

~~~
hjkm
Yeh exactly

------
kvgr
On some photos, you can see pavement blocks in the asphalt, where the wall has
been. Not sure if it is in all of the length, but it sure is in some places.

~~~
f_allwein
Yes, I believe it is most of the length. Very helpful actually, because
otherwise it would be hard to figure out where the wall has been as Berlin is
changing so much.

------
barking
To me it didn't look like they tried too hard to take the picture from the
same angle etc.

I remember a person from the old West Germany saying to me that they'd like
that wall back twice as high and the same depth underground because of all
reunification cost and the entitled attitude of 'osties'

~~~
woodpanel
Truth is, German Reunification was never an aim of West German politicians
until it suddenly appeared as an option at the end of the 1980s. And even
then, half of the political spectrum was strongly against it (eg Gerhard
Schröder, who later became German Chancellor). Before that, anyone who argued
in favor of reunification was eclipsed into the fringe.

Having been bombarded with arguments against reunification for decades by at
least one half of the spectrum, will have shaped the views of many. A lot of
people felt unease about an American president pushing so visibly for it, as
Reagan did.

For the German Easterners it must be said, they were the only
"revolutionaries", the only Germans who risked anything and showed courage and
actually fought for freedom. Yet, there is almost no official commemoration of
it. Partly because many Easterners were part of the system. Partly because the
West-German left hated to be reminded of their own amorality.

Thus, "reunification costs" are only a translucent argument. As if the
redistribution policies already existing in West-Germany weren't the real
culprit why the West-German worker was left so little of his wage and why the
job market was stagnating at best for years.

~~~
golergka
> Partly because the West-German left hated to be reminded of their own
> amorality.

What amorality are you talking about?

~~~
woodpanel
Being against reunification. Being reminded of the failed experiment across
the just deleted border. Being reminded that that failed experiment should
have given them some doubts about their doctrines. Being reminded that in the
most remarkable story of human progress in contemporary history [1], not only
were they not part of the heroes - they were complicit agents in defending the
status quo of an unfree Eastern Germany.

Which is why the SPD (with a few exceptions) and the Greens have never set
foot in the East as did the conservative CDU.

[1] that remarkable story of course includes the whole of Eastern Europe and
that human progress may only be equated to the rise of China (although not
politically).

------
kbutler
I met some East Germans in the US in July 1989. I asked them if the wall would
come down. They said the prime minister said, "Not in the next 100 years."

100 years vs. 5 months. Pretty close...

------
everyone
Looks like feckin' road engineers had their way with all the land freed up by
the removal of the wall. Great!

------
dehef
And now the world want exactly the same for Jerusalem. I find it's crazy.

------
binarray2000
It is ironic that a country, which reunited after tearing a wall between its
people in 1989, had a major role in breaking an almost neighboring country
apart, taking part in its destruction and (subsequently) raising walls between
people. I am talking about the former Yugoslavia.

A quote from a book "The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's
Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists" (published in
1999) by Martin A. Lee:

(Chapter eight "Shadow over the East", Page 299) Whereas the United States and
the rest of the European Community tried to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia,
Bonn unilaterally recognized Croatia as an independent nation at the end of
1991 and twisted arms to get other countries to comply with its wishes.
American officials subsequently charged that Bonn was responsible for
provoking the crisis in Yugoslavia, which had existed as a single country
since 1919, except for the gruesome interlude when Hitler created a Croatian
client state.

Reunified Germany’s preemptive diplomatic maneuver led to a major escalation
of the civil war in the Balkans, which took hundreds of thousands of lives and
displaced more than a million people. Bonn exacerbated the conflict by
supplying Croatia with large quantities of weapons. Between 1992 and 1994,
Germany exported $320 million of military hardware — including MiG fighter
jets, surface-to-air missiles, and late-model tanks — to Croatia, despite a
United Nations arms embargo forbidding such commerce. Convoys of up to fifteen
hundred military vehicles from former East Germany were discovered en route to
the Balkan farrago. Germany also trained Croatian pilots and provided
intelligence reports in an effort to vanquish their mutual enemy. Heleno Sano,
an expert on German defense issues, commented on the psychological
underpinnings of this policy: “In their ‘historic unconscious,’ the Germans
have resented the Serbs since World War II, because despite the fact that
Hitler sent in thirty divisions, he was unable to defeat the antifascist
guerrillas led by Tito.”

Under the auspices of NATO, German warplanes saw action for the first time
since 1945, carrying out aerial patrols to prevent Ser­bian fighter jets from
flying over Bosnian territory. And when the tide turned in Croatia’s favor in
the summer of 1995, Bonn agreed to contribute up to four thousand military
personnel to enforce a tenuous peace accord. German intervention was widely
depicted in humanitarian terms, but General Klaus Naumann had something else
in mind when he lobbied behind the scenes for a wider military role. While
some German officials expressed a genuine reluctance to interfere in a place
that had been devastated by Hitler, Naumann saw a chance for his men to test
their mettle in a combat setting.

~~~
woodpanel
Martin. A. Lee: When you thought conspiracy theorists were a specialty of the
far-right, the left fringe is always good for a surprise.

~~~
binarray2000
Why am I not surprised?

(1) You are a German.

(2) You are advocating for German imperial interests.

(3) "Drang nach Osten" (und Süden) is alive and kicking!

Thus, if anyone interferes with that by quoting facts they are "conspiracy
theorists", "heretics", "far-whatever".

Croatia is today, for the second time since the WWII, a German vassal. To
"pay" for the German political and military support in the 90ies, they have
had to sell everything of value to German interests for peanuts: Most hotels
on the Croatian part of the Adria coast are in German hand, Croatian telecom
company (actually, a strategic resource for every country) is now "Deutsche
Telekom", every Croatian company of value is owned by some German company.

The consequence are a high unemployment and a mass exodus: 300.000, some
figures go as far as 500.000, Croats have left Croatia since it became the EU
member in 2013 (2017 figures; according to Wikipedia, population estimate for
Croatia in 2017 is 4.154.200). Croatian MD's and nurses are in Germany,
keeping the German wages low for German hospital owners while German nurses
live off of social security (because they don't want to break their backs in
12 hour shifts for chump change). Needless to say, Croatian medical system is
in disarray.

And this is only a part of economic woes Croatia goes through. I will not go
deep into political woes but name one: Croatia is the only country in the EU
and NATO, in which the highest ranking officials (President, cabinet members)
(1) attend openly fascistic and nazistic concerts, (2) make a yearly
pilgrimage to an Austrian town of Bleiburg where Tito (with the blessing from
US and GB) has killed some 90.000 Ustasha (Croats) in 1945, (3) deny the role
of the Croat people and their WWII Independent State in the genocide on Serbs,
Jews and Roma, (4) actively work (together with the Roman-Catholic church) on
rehabilitation of people responsible for those crimes.

One episode is illustrative: End of 2016, in the city of Jasenovac, which is
near the concentration camp Jasenovac, Croatian veterans from the 90ties have
installed a memorial plaque with words "Za dom spremni!" on it. It is Ustasha
greet during WWII, similar to "Sieg Heil" of the German Nazis. Now, as a
German, imagine that in the city of Dachau, near former Dachau concentration
camp, some veteran group puts a memorial plaque with "Sieg Heil" on it. What
would happen? They would be punished at the speed of light while the outcry in
the media would be enormous. In Croatia that memorial plaque stood there for
almost a year! (it was removed after 10 months in September 2017 and put in
the city of Novska, mere 10 km from the old spot)

And what does a "democratic" and "denazified" Germany do while Croatia revives
Nazism? It is DEAD silent! Vassal is still needed to do the dirty work (wage a
war, any kind of it) for German interests (again: "Drang nach Osten" (und
Süden))!

Now that we can understand who you are protecting by accusing others of being
"conspiracy theorists" (it took me awhile), one last question: If Martin A.
Lee is a "conspiracy theorist", what about New York Times?

[http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/germans-follow-
own-l...](http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/germans-follow-own-line-on-
yugoslav-republics.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/16/world/europe-backing-
germa...](http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/16/world/europe-backing-germans-
accepts-yugoslav-breakup.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
woodpanel
_You are advocating for German imperial interests_

Wait, what now? Where do you get this stuff?

 _" Drang nach Osten" (und Süden) is alive and kicking!_

By my actions? What are you even talking about?

By the sheer amount of words you use, I can see that you put a lot of effort
in your reasoning. How about improving your thought by not masking out all the
evidence that surrounds you, that neither Germans nor Croatians and other
Easterners are all about to revive what the Holocaust hasn't achieved?

You know by assuming that I am

 _a German._

and thus must be

 _advocating for German imperial interests_

your reasoning has more incommon with the Nazi-Racists than you might want to
realize.

