Potsdam; Monday, 30 March, 2015

The weather had improved marginally on the previous evening so after a long lie-in and a late check out I headed out into town.

First stop was to wander over to Bernauer Straße to look at the recently opened displays and walking route dedicated to the Berlin wall. The wall ran directly along the middle of the road with residents literally cut off from each other overnight.

To begin with there were several successful escape attempts as people could jump out of a window in an East Berlin house straight into the waiting nets of the West Berlin fire service standing outside on their side of the border. Quickly the authorities stopped this, first by bricking up the windows and then by demolishing the houses completely, eventually clearing even more buildings to create the death strip that ran between the outer wall (that the West Berliners saw) and the inner wall that kept the East Berliners in.

Today the path has the line of the wall clearly marked with metal posts, as well as fragments and recreations of the wall along with lots of information boards and displays about the area. There is a lot of information as well about the number of escape tunnels that were built under this part of the wall.

I spent quite a bit of time wandering along the wall and would have spent longer if it wasn’t for the weather deteriorating from drizzle to full on hard rain that was impossible to carry on wandering in.

I found a nice restaurant nearby and had an extended lunch break trying to sit out the rain.

Eventually the rain cleared back down to a drizzle, but only in time for me to have to start heading back to the hotel to collect my stuff and start the journey home.