The JaYmes Escape

I can see it in the distance as I walk down Friedrichstrasse; around me are hordes of tourists reading the museum-style displays that line the street. At the junction with Zimmerstrasse, a double row of cobblestones in the road marks where the wall once was, and on the other side is what remains of Checkpoint Charlie, manned by a US soldier with a big flag in front of a pile of sandbags and surrounded by souvenir stands.

Twenty years ago this was the site of the most heavily fortified border in the world; between East and West Berlin. Double walls topped with wire and lined with watchtowers, a patrol road in between, with guards, dogs and Kalashnikovs. This was a border created and patrolled by communist East Germany, the DDR, to contain and control an unhappy population desperate to escape to the bourgeois west. Some say that world war three nearly started right here, when US and Soviet tanks faced off across Checkpoint Charlie after a diplomatic dispute 45 years ago in October 1961.

Tak and I left Warsaw on the very comfortable, crowded, and ultimately rather late EC40, the Polish operated Berlin Warsaw Express, which was supposed to take six hours but ended up taking more than seven. After spending our remaining Zloty on some fine Polish beer and a lovely dinner in the restaurant car, the amiable men in uniform, Polish and German officers working their way down the train together, arrived for what will be my penultimate passport check, as there’s no border control between Germany and Belgium. From the station in the former East it was a short ride to the hostel, also in the former East, so this crossing of Checkpoint Charlie is the real deal.

Leaving the last hints of Lenin behind me, I walk along the former course of the wall to see the Brandenberg Gate and another dramatic scene of 20th century history, the Reichstag, which was reconstructed in the 1990s by architect Sir Norman Forster with a huge glass dome, and is once again the seat of the Bundestag, the German government. The fire that gutted it in 1933 ultimately gave Hitler the pretext he needed to abandon democracy, and some say that the Nazi government intentionally orchestrated the attack with this end in mind; that’s not all that different to some of those modern-day conspiracy theories is it?