'The wall in the mind'

A queue snaked outside a supermarket, signalling the arrival of a truck carrying strawberries. People stood for hours, awaiting their turn to buy the fruit. For them the queue and the wait were normal.

"We stood in line because that was something we always did," Matthias S. Klein, Editorial Consultant/Editor, Bridge Media, told Weekend Review. "There wasn't a lot of variety; there was one kind of butter. ... Why have eight different brands? Butter, is butter, is butter," he said. The government's aim was to provide the population with things, whether it be apartments, cars or clothing, "without much regard to whether they looked good".

Klein lived on the 17th floor of a high-rise in downtown Berlin, just a stone's throw from Checkpoint Charlie. He could see West Berlin from his balcony.

"On New Year's Eve we would watch the fireworks … but not for a second did it occur to me to want to go there. It was like looking at the moon. You saw it every day, you knew it was there, you knew it pretty well. But if anyone asked: ‘Do you want to go there?', you'd think [that was stupid]."

For families separated by the Berlin Wall, however, it was a very different story. When the wall came up and hindered travel between West and East Berlin, the city's residents working on one side and living on the other had a particularly hard time.

"It was a catastrophe," Dr Hope Harrison, a professor at George Washington University, Washington DC, told Weekend Review from Berlin. Harrison is a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Federal Foundation for Reappraising the East German Dictatorship and has spent the past year working on a book looking at debates in Germany over the past 20 years about how to view the Berlin wall in a historical perspective.

"[The wall] divided families and ruined lives. [Nothing can] have a bigger impact on the city than what the Berlin Wall had," she said. People with relatives in East Germany, she said, were aware of how big an obstacle it was. The border guards were stern and kept people going from West to East Germany waiting for hours and confiscated objects from citizens. Nothing critical of the East German regime was allowed to pass through, including Western newspapers. "People crossing from the west were always very nervous," she said.

For Klein, the wall's fall on November 9, 1989, did not come as a surprise. It was just another event leading up to the lifting of travel restrictions.

What happened with free travel between East and West Germany changed the face of the east almost immediately.

Klein was on the Berlin Metro when this first became apparent to him. "I saw [East Berliners] with packs and big boxes of Marlboro, laundry detergent and [diapers]. The East German cigarettes tasted bad and [people] thought [branded products] were better."

About four weeks after the wall fell, Klein travelled to West Berlin for the first time and visited a supermarket with friends. The smell of fresh coffee, he said, was one of the first things that hit him. He went to a fruit and vegetable stand and saw a fruit he had not seen before — a kiwi.

"It was round and furry and I didn't know whether I was supposed to just bite into it," he said. "The coffee had a distinct smell and West German chocolate tasted sweeter."

Construction of the mind

Twenty years have passed and just 20 kilometres of the Berlin Wall remain. According to Harrison, while the wall may not exist structurally, it still persists in the minds of Germans.

"Physically, they have mostly done away with the division. What remains is people talking about ‘wall in the mind'. The German unification on October 30, 1990, was the beginning of [an ongoing process of] uniting people and structures. It will take another generation [before the] ‘wall in the mind' is gone," she said.

Klein is among those who believe what is left of the Berlin Wall should be preserved. "Some say it blocks the view of the river but it should be kept as a memorial. Now there's a line of cobblestones and you can walk along the path — even if you don't follow it, you'll think ‘oh look, I just crossed it'. It's one of the best ideas anyone had," he said.

Although Klein concedes that for him, having grown up in the GDR, there is still a sense of the wall cutting through the streets, Germany, he said, is unrecognisable from the country he grew up in.

"The new Germany is cosmopolitan, open, relaxed if you can imagine it. [The Germans] are happy and relaxed about their position in the world."