It’s an overcast morning when I start my 155km walk along the Berlin Wall Trail, the Mauerweg, and the granite skies make the scarred, concrete remnants of the Wall along Bernauer Strasse look even more sinister than usual. Knots of tourists huddle around plaques and information points, dwarfed by a giant reproduction of the now-iconic photograph of Conrad Schumann leaping heroically over the original barbed-wire border towards the west and freedom.
This street, most of the eastern side of which forms the city’s official Berlin Wall Memorial, is one of the Mauerweg’s most storied stretches. It was here that the structure claimed its first victim (Ida Siekmann, who jumped from an apartment window), where some of the most famous tunnels were dug and where, in 1961, newlyweds Dieter and Monika Marotz waved across the street to their relatives and neighbours, who were not allowed to attend the ceremony.
At the memorial’s southern end is the window of remembrance, a large steel unit containing photographic portraits of the 136 people who died at the wall – mostly young men between 16 and 30, but also several women and even six children under nine. It’s partly in tribute to these victims, as well as the others who suffered pain and grief, that the Mauerweg was constructed.
Opened in 2004 following a decade-long campaign led by Green party MEP Michael Cramer (whose most recent achievement is the Iron Curtain Trail), the trail is built along the path of the former patrol roads used by East Germany’s border guards. The relaying of pathways and installation of signposts, information boards and memorial sites cost €10m and took three years but has been a success with locals and visitors.
While the latter tend to cluster around the trail’s best-known sections – Checkpoint Charlie, the East Side Gallery, Bernauer Strasse – there are many more fascinating stories awaiting anyone who follows its zigzagging course through the centre. Right at the heart of the modern government quarter, for example, an EU-directive-lob from the Reichstag, I find the Parlament der Bäume (parliament of trees, see below), a DIY ensemble of memorial stones, graffitied wall remnants and flourishing foliage that’s still run by its (now-octogenarian) founder, the artist and activist Ben Wagin.
Right on the Mitte-Kreuzberg border, a fenced-off garden with two-storey shack turns out to be the Baumhaus an der Mauer (treehouse at the wall), a project started in the 1980s by Turkish immigrant Osman Kalin, who cultivated a wedge of wasteland that was owned by East Germany. Despite the Volkspolizei once allegedly ordering him to chop down his sunflowers because they were threatening to grow taller than the wall, the garden is miraculously still going strong today.
Cramer, aware that two-thirds of the Berlin Wall lay outside the city centre, saw the Mauerweg as a site of recreation as well as memory – an opportunity to explore not only the city’s interesting urban peripheries but the lakes, forests and bucolic countryside of surrounding Brandenburg. And indeed, as I make my way south towards the beleaguered Berlin-Brandenburg-International airport, and the modernist high-rises of the Gropiusstadt (made famous in the 1980s by the Bowie-soundtracked film Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo), I pass a steady stream of hikers, joggers, cyclists and dog walkers.
Some 38km of the western border was by water, including some of the city’s cleanest lakes: Griebnitzsee, Gross Glienicker See and Wannsee (see below). The scenery along these sections is striking: sun-dappled trails, sandy beaches lined with golden reeds, and an embarrassment of Unesco heritage riches from Friedrich Wilhelm II’s Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island) to the handsome Church of the Redeemer in Sacrow – all conveniently punctuated by welcoming beer gardens.
In the north, the trail is mostly characterised by woods: the sprawling Spandau forest, the Waldgelände Frohnau (which hides one of the few remaining watchtowers, now appropriated by a youth organisation for nature conservation work) and the Tegeler Fliess, a nature area marked with sandy embankments, grazing horses and picnic areas. Yet the tales and tragedies of the Berlin Wall are never far away. In fact, the consistent presence of plaques, memorials and information posts prompts a kind of dissonance – the violent past with the idyllic present – that becomes very much part of the trail’s experience.
Several days after I started out, the Mauerweg returns me to the city. On the Bornholmer Strasse, at the place the wall first fell on 9 November 1989, I pause to look at a photo exhibition depicting scenes from that night. The faces here, in contrast to those at the window of remembrance, are jubilant, incredulous. These are the lucky ones – the ones who lived to see the wall fall, who danced on it, smashed at it with hammers, who crossed it without ever looking back.
Highlights
Bernauer Strasse Berlin Wall Memorial: this 1.4km stretch of street pays tribute to the victims of the wall and helps visitors understand how lives were lived on either side.
Griebnitzsee to Wannsee: this 15km segment of the Mauerweg is one of its most attractive, passing along sparkling shorelines as well as Prussian, second world war and cold war historic sites.
Parliament of Trees: this half-hidden site is remarkable for its proximity to the government quarter and the indefatigable energy taken to maintain it for the last quarter of a century.
Need To Know
For a stage-by-stage guide to walking the Mauerweg visit berlin.de. A map of the route with descriptions by Michael Cramer is published by Verlag Esterbauer.
The Berlin Wall app shows the route of the wall, as well as sites of interest, suggestions for wall tours and public transport connections.
For a longer account of the whole walk, as well as photographs and an accompanying essay by Paul Scruton, see the author’s self-published Mauerweg: Stories from the Berlin Wall Trail
Tours
Slow Travel Berlin offers guided walking tours along parts of the Mauerweg from €15-€20pp (2-4 hours). It has multiple wall-related tours running over this weekend (7-9 November).
Fat Tire runs a bike tour – €24 for five hours – along the wall (including 8 and 9 November).
Berlin on Bike has a 3.5-hour tour between Bornholmer Strasse and the government district for €19pp.
Context has a three-hour walk that starts at the Bernauer Strasse memorial for €70pp (3 hours).
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