Robin Oomkes gives some practical tips on cycling the Berlin Wall trail…
The most dramatic part of the Berlin Wall was probably the 40km inner-city section that divided West and East Berlin. But a much longer stretch, 165km in total, encircled all of West Berlin, separating it from the surrounding GDR countryside.
Apart from keeping GDR citizens from entering West Berlin, it also caused a kind of claustrophobia in many West Berliners, who could not easily leave the city.
You can try to get some idea of what life was like outside and inside the Wall by taking the Berliner Mauerweg, or Berlin Wall Trail, a fully signposted cycle and hiking path that follows the course of where the wall used to be.
I cycled the path in two days, starting at the former Chausseestrasse border crossing, continuing south through the city, and following the trace of the Wall clockwise.
On the first day I cycled 72 km to Potsdam-Griebnitzsee, and took the S-Bahn back to Berlin-Mitte. On the second day, from the same S-Bahn station, I continued clockwise for another 95 km back to Mitte.
Cycling the Wall so long after German reunification is a strange experience. First of all, it’s astonishing how little there is left of it. There are information panels on the path that show aerial photos of what the border strip looked like in the 1980s but the sandy wasteland, watchtowers, outer wall, inner wall… almost all of this has gone.
Around 125 km of the Mauerweg outside the city, I spotted two remaining watchtowers, and a few slabs of inner and outer wall – and that’s it. (If you’re looking for that kind of thing, you might as well stick to the inner city). The no-man’s-land of the death strip is either overgrown, built up, or otherwise disguised. Again, there’s only a few places where it is immediately recognisable.
What’s also strange is how hard it has become here to tell East from West. If you’ve been to Brandenburg towns outside Berlin (Oranienburg, for example), you probably agree that they still look very “GDR” in places. But on my clockwise run down the path that straddles the West Berlin border, I had to keep reminding myself that “left is East” and “right is West”.
