After visiting the New National Gallery, we went on a walk guided by a volunteer with GuruWalk .
The person was very knowledgeable about Kreuzberg. He had done a lot of research and had many photos of the area over the past century.
The district has a high percentage of immigrants, most of whom are Turkish. Many immigrants arrived to make up for the labour shortage in the 1960s and 1970s.
Kreuzberg is renowned for protest and counter-culture. Once quite a poor area, it is now being gentrified, which some locals are resisting.
Perhaps more than any other part of Berlin, graffiti is a major part of the district’s culture. We saw examples of it everywhere. Some is tolerated; some is removed.
Split by the Berlin wall before 1989, Kreuzberg is now a mix of the old and the new. Kreuzberg is an outlier even in Berlin, which itself is an usual German city.
One of the questions, Helene and I wondered about the previous day was: if the Berlin wall separated east and west Berlin, how was the rest of East Germany and West Germany separated?! The answer, it turned out, was that there were lots of different types of ways of enforcing military exclusion zones, such as high metal fences, walls, alarms, watchtowers, trenches, minefields, floodlights, and so on. Houses near the border were demolished by East Germany and forests were cleared to create visibility. Residents in border zones needed permits to live there.
What was special about Berlin? Why did Berlin alone have a wall? Our guide had a map. Berlin wasn’t on the border of the former countries: it was an enclave inside East Germany! West Berlin was a bit of the western world inside East Germany.
Before 1961, people could move relatively easily between East and West Berlin. However, millions of East Germans used Berlin as an escape route to the West. East Germany was losing skilled workers and young people. So, in 1961, East Germany built the Berlin wall.
In practice, West Berlin was part of West Germany. However, technically, West Berlin remained under the control of the World War II controlling powers: France, UK, US, and USSR. Therefore, it had a special legal and political status. Its rules were different from the rest of West Germany. For example, men living in West Berlin were exempt from military conscription. So a young man moving to West Berlin could avoid the draft. It ended up becoming a magnet for counter-culture, which it remains today.
When East Germany and West Germany were reunited, the border between the countries became a “German Green Belt”. The border, having been closed for nearly 40 years, created a haven for wildlife in some places.
This was a fascinating and informative walk. We finished at a market hall, which had been on our list to visit. We had dinner there.
