Cold War Tidbits

The day after we departed from Denmark, we arrived in Warnemunde, a seaport in Germany, and boarded a train for Berlin. All the cities previously visited had been amazing and interesting, but to a sixty-something American, this was over the line into unbelievable. I was in the 8th grade when a hit song was "West of the Wall," and my large iPod has a comedy "song" on it called "The Berlin Top Ten." I find it hard to believe that the Berlin Wall has been down for nearly twenty years, and here I was.

The first highlight of the visit was to a location that is now in the middle of a street in Berlin, but which was for decades on the border between East Berlin and West Berlin. The only American "checkpoint" in Berlin, it was the focal point for the existence of the Berlin Wall as well as the focal point for East Germans trying to escape to freedom. Now a historical location, the small building is there along with a short stack of sandbags. Men in U.S. and French uniforms are willing to pose with tourists for only a couple of Euros. And a very enterprising stand has old Passport stamps, and for only 10 Euros, a visitor can have seven Berlin checkpoint stamps posted into his or her passport. It looks as if I traveled back and forth between the Russian and the American and the British and the French Zones. A nice souvenir.

Higher in the air is a great Cold War souvenir. A communications tower was built in East Berlin, with television and other broadcast media, and the Communist regime was forced to contract with the West for the communications hardware. They received a successful communications core, constructed the tower and placed the mirror-surfaced unit where it belonged. And shortly thereafter, members of the officially-atheist government noticed the headache that had been slipped over the wall and into the East Berlin skyline.

They even tried scuffing the surface to try to remove the symbol, but of course it was futile. You do see the cross glinting in the Berlin sun, don't you?

More from Berlin in the next post.