Wanderung 32

Off to Berlin! We took an S Bahn to Hauptbahnhof and then a fast, inter-city ICE express train to Berlin. The landscape between Hamburg and Berlin was remarkably flat, somewhat like the Great PLains of the USA, but much wetter and lush looking. Some fields were already growing plants, but others were either being kept fallow for the year or just had not been planted yet.

Monika's nephew Eberhard picked us up right at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, which was awfully nice of him as we later found out that the S Bahn trains from Hauptahnhof to his house really are quite simple if you know the S Bahn network and you remember to get your tickets time-stamped, which is necessary on that system! Eberhard and Birgit have a nice house on the far northern edge of Berlin, quite close to the city limits and a decent distance from downtown Berlin.

We mostly relaxed with Eberhard that afternoon as he had taken a day off of work to be with us but his wife Birgit had to work that day. We did stretch our legs to walk first over to a curious area called "Der Entenschnabel" (English: "The Duck's Beak") that is only a few blocks over from their house. This area is a small, beak-shaped extension of the Brandenburg District that lies to the North, into the northern edge of the city of Berlin proper.

The Duck's Beak, is not, however, just a curious geopolitical anomaly but rather the site of courage and high drama during the Communist occupation of East Germany. The Brandenburg District, and thus the area within the Duck's Beak, was part of Communist East Germany, whereas the area surrounding it was part of the free Allied sector of West Berlin. Thus the inhibitants of the Duck's Beak could just walk across the boundary a block and be free. To prevent this, the East German government built a high wall surrounding the entire area of West Berlin, and that wall faithfully followed the outline of the Duck's Beak. The local folks have, by the way, preserved a couple sections of that wall as a memento of that past, but they have carefully painted over them with cheerful symbols of peace (a dove) and freedom (a balloon) to become decorative gates to the Duck's Beak area. Now that's a way to "beat swords into ploughshares"!

Walking past that pretty gateway and the otherwise invisible erstwhile border area, we entered the modern area of the Duck's Beak, which is now a peaceful piece of suburbia. But 'twas not always thus. When the border wall was erected, some of the local East Germans were so eager to flee the "Worker's Paradise" that they stared digging a tunnel from the basement of a house on the Communist side of the border wall, to a house located a hundred yards or so away on the West Berlin side of the wall. They had to carefully hide all the dirt they removed so that the border guards patrolling the area would not get suspicious. The also couldn't bring in construction timber, so they broke up and used any spare wood they could find, like pieces of old furniture, to reinforce the walls and ceiling of the tunnel. Sound familiar?

Well, it distinctly reminded me of the POWs building escape tunnels and hiding the excavated dirt in the old WWII movie, "The Great Esacape", which was also based on fact. It is unbelievable to me that the tunnel builders kept all this activity secret, but after five and a half months of hard labor they in fact succeeded. Four families with 13 people escaped through that tunnel before it was finally discovered by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police, and closed down. Personally, I hope someone makes a movie about this, because the motivation was just as high and the risks just as severe as in "The Great Escape".

We finished up our afternoon perambulation by walking around the small Waldsee (English: Forest Lake) a tiny lake set in a wooded park area to the North of Eberhard and Birgit's house. Apparently the lake had been contaminated in some way, because there were "no swimming" signs, but the local government is painstakingly excavating and replacing the sediments on the bottom of the lake to make it again usable.

When we finally arrived back at the house, Birgit came home and we later had a nice supper together, and talked late into the night (late for us is, however, 10 pm!). That way we could all catch up on all the news from both our side and their side of the family before retiring for the night. I enjoy getting the news directly from the people involved because that way I also get a better feeling for how they reacted to things (from the non-verbal clues) and can ask follow-on questions to resolve any ambiguities, which is important to me.