A bike tour along the Berlin Wall ‘Death Strip’, 30 years after it fell

Braking to a halt, it’s strange to think that stepping on the ground beneath my tyres would have meant certain death 30 years ago. Now a wooded cycle path beside restless urban railway lines, the wide space under the bridge on Bornholmer Strasse was for 28 years part of the “Death Strip” in between the two sides of the Berlin Wall. It was here, too, on 9 November 1989, that the Cold War came to an abrupt end as hopeful East Berliners breached the border and crossed the bridge above us to the west.

“At every point, the story of the Berlin Wall is how little we humans understand the consequences of our actions,” my guide Dr Lauren van Vuuren says, her voice muffled by the electrical whirring of a passing S-bahn train.

While the majority of the physical wall has long since been dismantled, the lingering memory of the Berlin Wall is back in the spotlight this year as the city marks the 30th anniversary of its demise. It’s possible to cycle or walk the length of its 96-mile course around West Berlin, but I went for a bike tour along one of its most historically significant sections.

We set off down the path following the line of what would have been the outer wall to Mauerpark, which translates as “wall park”. The Fernsehturm, Berlin’s 1960s TV tower, peers at us over the socialist-era apartment blocks, ever omnipresent on the city skyline like an all-seeing eye.

“Wherever the Berlin Wall ran, it really strangled the city and both the eastern and western sides became very derelict,” Van Vuuren continues as we draw closer to the park through the now trendy neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg. As we do, we catch sight of the new, modern housing blocks springing up on what was no man’s land between east and west.

Continuing the wall’s legacy of destroying communities, rampant development and gentrification of neglected areas where it once stood are accelerating what Van Vuuren calls “social cleansing”. During its near 30-year-long existence, those who once lived where the barbed wire and concrete sprang up were evicted and replaced with socialist ideologues and GDR patriots.

Three decades on from reunification, the long shadow of developers and landlords are pricing out the older, working class communities who can no longer afford to pay the rocketing rents ushered in by gentrification and are being scattered throughout the city. In 2018, for instance, Berlin came top of the list of cities with the world’s fastest rent increases.

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In the park itself, hipsters slouch in the summer sunshine on its slopes. Behind them, among crooked birch trees, we find our first tangible traces of the wall itself emblazoned with bright graffiti.

Although Berlin today is almost unrecognisable as the divided city it once was – most physical evidence of its disunity has been reclaimed by property developers – residents are reluctant to forget. “Where nothing has been done, birch trees have grown. So, you can follow the line of the Berlin Wall for kilometres through the city through these amazing, narrow little birch forests,” Van Vuuren says. “I find it very moving. It’s almost like the city grew its own memorial to the wall.”

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Having grown up under apartheid in South Africa in the comfort of white, middle-class suburbia and detached from scenes of burning townships and rioting, the historian perhaps knows only too well how conditioned life would have been in the shadow of the wall. “If you live in a society where the government has the power to control knowledge,” she says solemnly, “you can be in a situation where you are completely ignorant to your situation.”

“West Berliners lived inside the wall; they were actually free,” she adds. “East Germans lived on the outside of the wall and they were prisoners in their own country.”

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It wasn’t just the living who were repressed by the East German regime. The dead also fell prey to the wall being built indiscriminately through graveyards, as I see at the Invalidenfriedhof. The traditional resting place for Germany’s military heroes (and some infamous Nazi figures), the cemetery was cleft in two, narrowly missing the grave of fighter ace, Manfred von Richthofen, or the “Red Baron” as he is better known. His tomb, which was in the “Death Strip”, still clearly bears bullet holes from shots fired at attempted escapees.

Pushing on through a woodland park, where the Nordbahnhof station once stood before it too fell victim to the wall’s construction, we circle back towards our last stop at the the official Berlin Wall memorial site on Bernauer Strasse. Cycling along the wall really opens up Berlin in a way that walking just can’t, taking you away from the thronged tourist spots to trace the course of a once divided city which is still reconnecting through the districts most impacted.

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On Bernauer Strasse, almost a mile of the border strip (some of which has been picked clean like a carcass by “wall pickers” scavenging for keepsakes) is preserved in perpetuity. Here the “Death Strip”, now devoid of tripwire, machine guns, dog patrols and all but one of its watchtowers, is an open space of pristine lawns between the street where the wall ran and the apartment blocks on either side. The green fault line on which we’re now standing is the focus of reconciliation, with a chapel and a museum built to educate future generations.

Perhaps the most poignant section of the memorial is the Window of Remembrance installation, from which the faces of those who died trying to escape to the west peer out from black and white pictures. There was no discrimination when it came to the 140 or so Berliners killed along the wall. Holger H was just 15 months old when he died escaping with his parents. Olga Segler was 80.

“When you think of Germans, you think 6 million dead. So, you’d think 140 is not that much. But when you think that these people literally died trying to get from here to there in their own city...” Van Vuuren breaks off. “Each death is a tragedy.”

EasyJet flies to Berlin from £20.99 one way.

The Berlin Wall Bike Tour with Berlin on Bike! takes 3.5 hours and costs €19 plus €5 for the bike hire.

For more information on the week-long programme of events commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall from 4-10 November, visit visitberlin.de.