When my wife visited Berlin as a college student, the city was divided by a wall. She took advantage of an opportunity to cross the border at “Checkpoint Charlie” and spent a few hours in East Berlin. Her memory is that everything on the Soviet side of the dividing line was gray.
Checkpoint Charlie is now a chintzy tourist magnet while the broad streets that stretch east on what was once the colorless Soviet side of the wall have become a glitzy, high-priced commercial zone.
Several hundred yards into the western side of the divide there is a not-to-be-missed mix of historical remembrance. Here a large portion of the Berlin Wall remains scarred but still standing. Running parallel, but below ground level, are exposed portions of what were prisons during Hitler’s reign of terror thirty years earlier, presented with photographs, dairy entries, newspaper articles and other documents — and a detailed timeline which demonstrates how relatively quickly a republic can be retired and a dictatorship installed.
The Berlin Wall and the Third Reich are not directly related to each other; the authorities responsible for each were actually bitter adversaries. But to see these ruins occupying the same ground is to help understand how first one and then another authoritarian regime controlled this space, and to appreciate how fragile republics — even our young republic in the USA — can be.
JER
ALL OVER THE MAP 