As the 30th anniversary of its fall approaches, a cycle ride along the route of the Berlin Wall reveals a once-divided city now open and welcoming

It makes for delightful cycling: dappled sunshine, a smooth path, birds in the trees. The only clue that this isn’t just any woodland trail is the height of those trees: the oaks and beeches are young, barely three metres tall.

That’s because we’re riding on what, until 1989, was the “death strip” – the zone between Berlin’s inner and outer walls, filled with tripwire machine guns, trenches and dogs, and guarded by soldiers in watchtowers. This November sees the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I’m riding stretches of the Berliner Mauerweg – the 160km trail tracing its path – to see how the city has rearranged itself in three decades.

“The wall wasn’t a wall here, but a high fence.” Rainer Block, a local SPD councillor, is showing us around his patch in the south of the city. Grossziethen is as tidy and prosperous-looking a German suburb as you could imagine, which makes its history more jarring. As we ride, Rainer points out streets close to the border where only the party faithful were allowed to live, stepladders had to be locked away, and overnight guests had to be reported. A memorial tells of Horst Kullack, a 23-year-old with learning difficulties who, after a few drinks on New Year’s Eve 1971, wanted to visit his beloved grandmother in West Berlin, and was fatally shot by the guards.

Here Berlin comes to an abrupt stop – fields of wheat and barley on one side and the apartment blocks of the Bauhaus Gropiusstadt on the other. Today the area is a weekend destination for cyclists and walkers, who queue excitedly outside the Moin Moin ice-cream parlour in Grossziethen (try the vivid green Waldmeister – woodruff – flavour).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rainer Block points out where wall ran in Grossziethen. Photograph: Liz Boulter

It’s salutary to remember that the wall was a feature of the city for less time (just over 28 years) than has now passed since it fell. Signs of the division are being erased, and not only by nature. We see neat new family houses on stretches of the death strip – it was a boon for urban planners, says Rainer. But in some ways, the wall is still there: he points out the well-kept front garden of one of his neighbours, enclosed by a few metres of unremarkable metal mesh. “The authorities bulldozed the fence,” says Rainer, “but left the debris. This chap just recycled the materials.”

Two hours’ ride west is Potsdam, with its palaces, period houses and the Glienicke bridge, which actually looks a lot less bleak than in the 2015 film Bridge of Spies. By the Jungfernsee, we bag a lakeside table at the Meierei brewery and get stuck into huge Maß (litre) glasses of beer.

Also enjoying a beer are Rafael, a twentysomething Berliner, and his Brazilian girlfriend Luisa: both are both passionate about their united and outward-looking city. “There are no boundaries,” says Rafael, a microbiologist. “Friends from the former GDR might use slightly different words, but no one thinks anything of it.” Luisa, who works here for a football app, says she wouldn’t swap Berlin for anywhere. “It’s so open and welcoming – you’re as likely to hear Spanish or Portuguese in a bar as German, and many workplaces operate in English.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Meierei brewery garden in Potsdam. Photograph: Getty Images

Rafael loves the way once forbidden or dangerous places, marked by suffering and death, have become the city’s happening areas, known for dancing and fun.

We’d seen this the day before near our Airbnb flat in newly named Kreuzkölln, a lively district between trendy Kreuzburg and multicultural Neukölln, where cool organic cafes rub shoulders with cheap Syrian and Sudanese restaurants. The wall ran down its eastern edge, which made this an unpopular dead-end area before reunification, and one ripe for hipster colonisation afterwards.

After 1989, many East Berliners wanted the “wall of shame” torn down and forgotten; it was West Berliners mainly who fought to keep parts of it standing and its route marked – by a double row of cobbles. We follow these towards Treptow Park, with its massive, very Soviet-looking memorial to USSR soldiers who died in 1945’s Battle of Berlin, and note with amusement that, at one point, the marker cobbles disappear beneath the concrete car park of a large Aldi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The author by the Spree, with the double row of cobbles marking the wall route, and the Reichstag in the background.

Turning north, the trail crosses the Spree river at the ornate Oberbaumbrück. To our right in Friedrichshain, Berlin’s party zone, handsome, once-derelict Osthafen buildings have a new lease of life as nightclubs, hotels and recording studios; to our left is the longest remaining stretch of wall, now the famous East Side Gallery. Though one of the city’s most popular sights, it’s not sacred: in 2015, despite local protests, a section of the wall was removed and re-erected a few metres back to make way for a shiny white 14-storey apartment block by a firm called Living Bauhaus. There are great views of it and the river from the rooftop bar of a new hotel Indigo opened here in January.

Less-visited than the East Side is an informal open-air gallery in the northern, arty district of Prenzlauer Berg. At a remnant of the inner wall in the Mauerpark, we chat to street artists from Vietnam and Prague, as well as Germany, as they wield their spray cans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Bernauer Strasse Memorial. Photograph: Alamy

The Mauerweg leads from here past a poignant memorial at Bernauer Strasse, with photographs, chapel and museum, then west along residential streets. Like many cities, Berlin is growing fast, and by the Spandau ship canal the preserved Kieler Eck watchtower – where 24-year-old Günter Liftin was the first fugitive shot and killed, in 1961 – now gazes over new high-end waterside apartments.

From here it’s a short ride down to the main station and river and, with a jolt, we pop out into tourist Berlin. Groups with headsets are being led around Museum Island, the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate, but we feel our three days in the saddle have given us a much deeper appreciation of this most open of once-closed cities.



• The Berlin Wall Trail (Mauerweg) traces the course of the former GDR fortifications encircling West Berlin. For map and section notes see berlin.de. There are several app-operated dockless cycle schemes in Berlin, such as Mobike (€1.20 for 30mins). Accommodation was provided by Airbnb, which has a wide selection of flats in Berlin from £50 a night

Wall-to-wall celebrations for 2019

The Berlin Wall Race

A 161km run around the wall route, in an anti-clockwise direction, starting in Prenzlauer Berg. The race is sold out for runners but spectating will be great fun.

• 17-18 August, 100meilen.de

Oderberger Straße walk

Until 1989, this was a dead-end street ending at the wall. This free walk tells tales of life on the street in the 1970s and 80s, finishing at the site of a viewing platform on the west side.

• Selected Fridays and Sundays 21 June to 9 November, register at berlin@hdg.de

Free music festival

The highlight of a week’s celebration in November will be a free music festival on 9 November, with stages along the wall route featuring artists connected with the events of 1989/90, or who stand for a fresh start.

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