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YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. As warnings go, these six words, which appear on a sign that today hangs in Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie Museum, could hardly be clearer or more concise. Up until November 1989, they served final notice that your next steps would take you beyond the protection of the Federal Republic of Germany, through the Iron Curtain and into East Berlin.

Two years before it was finally demolished in 1991, the Berlin Wall had well and truly burst at the seams, ruptured by the tide of anti-communist sentiment that was sweeping across Europe. As anyone who watched the moment unfold on TV will recall, thousands of people on both sides of the Wall went at it for the life-defeating object it was, hammering off chunks of concrete or banding together to topple entire sections and then clambering through the rubble into the waiting arms of their countrymen and women. It was with this image in mind that I was returning to Berlin for the first time since 1988, to see what had become of the Wall and the city it kept divided for almost thirty years.

The main tourist office in Breitscheidplatz seems like a good place to begin following the fate of the Wall, and it’s a surprise to find the city does little to trade on the history of its most (in)famous landmark. I’d assumed that most tourists came to Berlin for the same reasons I had: to see the guard towers that once menaced the soulless expanse of no-man’s land, to photograph protest art on those bits of the Wall left standing, or to gain an insight into whatever it was Pink Floyd were on about. Far from Wall Tours being spruiked on every corner, the city’s information offices simply provide visitors with a detailed Wall Map, perfect for a do-it-yourself historical tour of the Berlin Wall.

Having rented a bicycle for the day’s outing (biking is a great option in Berlin – clean air, no hills and cycling paths everywhere), my first stop was the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, located at the site of what was, until 1990, Europe’s most famous border crossing between East and West. Among many evocative images and artefacts on display here are a photo of an East German soldier vaulting the boom-gate at his own guard post; an ancient and rusty Volkswagen modified to smuggle a person under its hood; and a pictorial account of Tunnel 57 – at 460 feet the longest dug beneath the Wall and the eventual escape route of fifty-seven people.

Most affecting of all are the photos of people leaping from the windows of apartment blocks that bordered the Wall just as East German troops arrived to brick them up, and those of eighteen year-old Peter Fechter, who lay shot and dying in full view of soldiers from both sides who were too afraid of each other to venture out and retrieve him. Alongside these harrowing tales however, are uplifting and even comic ones that celebrate the ingenuity of the people-smugglers, tunnellers, sub-mariners and backyard balloonists who made a mockery of the supposedly formidable border security of the former German Democratic Republic.

A twenty-minute ride from Checkpoint Charlie is the Berlin Wall Documentation Center, also the site of the city’s official Berlin Wall Memorial. The memorial is not much to look at – just a few concrete slabs standing beside a bare strip of gravel – but the drab apartment buildings in this part of town are a poignant reminder of just how grim East Berlin came to look under the GDR. There are thousands of documents and images archived here, the most arresting being film footage of border guards pursuing people as they make a dash for freedom towards a barbwire fence. The guards just fail to tackle the escapees, but miraculously keep their rifles shouldered even as their quarry is struggling through the fence wire, a sitting target barely twenty metres away. It is heartening to discover that, contrary to Hollywood images of the cold and inhuman East German soldier, many chose to abandon their posts rather than fire on their compatriots.

After taking in a little of the history, it was time to have a look at the Wall itself – or at what’s left of it. Several small sections have been left standing, but the only one really worth visiting is known as the East Side Gallery. It is here you will find the murals that depict cars crashing through and people legging it over the Wall, while close by is the most photogenic of the guard towers left standing – a twenty-foot high concrete box keeping its lonely vigil in what is now a leafy public park.

Other memorials dotted about the city commemorate some of the notorious incidents associated with the Wall and its route through the city centre has been permanently marked out by a double row of cobblestones. These physical symbols will undoubtedly remain, yet oddly enough, the Wall’s legacy is not so much that it once divided the old Berlin, but rather that an entirely new Berlin has evolved so quickly in the wake of its fall. Re-unification of citizens and neighbours, once separated by political ideology and material aspirations, has been achieved with remarkably little fuss.

When I put it to local student, Uli Schmitz, that Berliners seem very tolerant of one another, she shook her head. “Tolerance is putting up with someone else’s views or lifestyle even though you don’t agree with them. In Berlin, people have had to make room for such different ideologies and expectations that the easiest solution was to stop caring what anyone else’s politics are, where they were educated and how much money they make. This is the only city in Europe where you could meet six people at a party and not one of them will ask what you do for a living”. Among Uli’s peers, some of them from other parts of Germany and all well travelled, there was unanimous agreement that Berlin ranks among the most open and inclusive cities in Europe.

Today, what little remains of the Berlin Wall continues to crumble, worn by the elements or chiselled away in chunks by souvenir hunters. City authorities do not seem particularly interested in preserving what’s left, yet Berlin does not strike you as a city trying to escape or deny its turbulent history. Rather, its citizens have quietly left the past behind, in favour of what looks to be a very promising future.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BERLIN WALL: July 1961: The Federal Minister for All-German Affairs reveals numbers of citizens fleeing the GDR via West Berlin – 18,000 in May and 20,000 in June. 13 August, 1961: Soldiers of the East Berlin army begin to erect a barbwire barricade along the 100-mile border dividing East Berlin and the GDR from West Berlin; the fence is gradually replaced by bricks and mortar, the final version being a solid concrete edifice 12 feet high. 24 August, 1961: the Wall claims its first victim, Günter Litfin. 5 February, 1989: the Wall claims its last victim, Chris Gueffroy. 30 June, 1990: All border controls in Berlin are removed. Police records state that 5,075 people fled East Germany via the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989; 241 died in the attempt.

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