On Whit Monday, I took advantage of the public holiday and the presence of my in-laws (to look after Rafi) to go on a bike ride to the northernmost section of the Berlin Wall Trail (which turned out to be a 43 mile ride in total).

On the edge of Hohen Neuendorf (or, technically, just across the state line and former border in Frohnau), there was a substantial exhibition on the Wall, located outside of one of the few remaining watchtowers.

I found this exhibition interesting not least because it featured an infoboard about the East German border guards who portrayed the Wall. Rather than being psychopaths who volunteered for the chance to fire upon their fellow citizens, many of them were soldiers who had to serve involuntarily on the Wall, and feared being put into the position of having to open fire on people trying to escape to the West:

One day in October 1989 Holger Westphal found himself with fifteen soldiers and a Kalashnikov in his lorry in the Berlin hinterland, to protect this area. On the day in question demonstrations were announced, therefore the security level was somewhat raised.

Shortly before leaving the lorry, the officer gave the order to shoot in the case of an attempted border crossing. Later this order was, however, disclaimed. The fifteen soldiers, who had to take up positions every fifty metres, decided in advance though not to shoot, which would have been punished as high treason.

(Translation by myself.) Westphal goes on to say the fall of the Wall was his happiest day as a soldier.

From another infoboard, after mentioning that the Wall stood 2-3m inside EastGerman territory:

Feared by me were the inspection rounds on the other side of the Wall. As a soldier I had to proceed with a machine pistol, behind me an officer equipped with a pistol.

Sometimes it happened that French soldiers waved (this being alongside the French occupation zone of West Berlin); I could just run away and make off. Then I heard a quiet click. The officer behind me had released the safety on his pistol. And it was fully clear that he would not fire upon the French. Just don't stumble now, I thought in a panic.

Another infoboard related the life of those living in houses in HohenNeuendorf in the border zone, whom people had to get permission to visit, whichwas almost never granted to non-relatives. Guests were not allowed inside their houses, which meant that to receive guests they had to carry tables and chairs onto the street; and their children were never able to host birthday parties.

Another showed how at Bernauer Straße in central Berlin, the border area was progressively widened: At first, a wall was only constructed across street mouths, and the windows of houses facing into West Berlin were walled up. Later, a border strip was created and the houses were demolished, except for their façade, which continued to serve as part of the Wall; later still that was replaced with the well-known concrete wall with a pipe on top (to make it difficult to purchase handholds for anyone trying to climb over).

As part of this, part of a cemetery adjoining Bernauer Straße was turned into the killing field in front of the wall, and the graves were moved. I couldn't help but find myself wondering, though, whether this was because the authoritarian communist regime viewed having soldiers patrolling through the cemetery as a descration, or whether they were worried about the dead defecting to the West...

My bike ride on 9 March took me to a place called Steinstücken, which is a settlement of only a few streets:

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Property transactions in the eighteenth century followed by the incorporation of surrounding areas into Berlin resulted in this becoming an exclave of Berlin surrounded entirely by Brandenburg. When the city was divided after the War and at the start of the Cold War, Steinstücken was left cut off, with the inhabitants having to pass through two checkpoints to get into the rest of Berlin.

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Map from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons licence

(The roads crossing the state line today obviously did not exist during the divided Berlin territory. Where I took my photo above from, where Bernhard-Beyer-Straße meets Steinstraße on the map above, was at the time the route of a mini-Berlin Wall, complete with a killing field outside it.)

Eventually, in 1972, a deal was done in which a corridor of West Berlin territory was created to connect it to the rest of Berlin, in exchange for West Germany ceding six uninhabited other exclaves to East Germany, and paying four million marks.

This is the approach road that this deal resulted in becoming usable. The road itself is in Berlin (what was West Berlin), but everything immediately to both the right and the left is Brandenburg (what was East Germany).

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(There's no signs indicating this on the road itself, which I found a little disappointing, though there is a sign in Steinstücken.)

At the southern end of the road, the geography gets even more fractal, as the road is in Berlin, the railway line to the right in Brandenburg, and then the area to the right of the railway line Berlin again.

This sign amused me:

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No, there was not a T-junction in the Berlin Wall here, but the Berlin Wall Trail has a three-way split: the original route ignored the shenanigans around Albrecht's Tar Kiln and left the route of the wall for a spell, but there's a new route under construction following it more accurately. Here's where the old route and the new route converge.