Berlin Wall

Berlin Wall
Originally uploaded by madabandon.

This is what remains of the Berlin Wall. It is a stretch about fifty feet long on a rather bland street. Across the street from this remnant of the wall is a little museum in the form of a steel tower which you can ascend and get a view of how the scar of the wall bisects the city. I came upon it unintentionally--although it was a place I was interested in visiting--and found it very moving. To imagine this magnificent city split in two, and how people who might have been friends separated by only a few streets were entirely cut off from one another. And the utter prosaic location, and the blocks of post-war East German apartments across from it, belie it's intense symbolism. Like much of Berlin I found it intense, and it made me wonder what it must be like to live in a city with such a powerful and dramatic history.