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We follow the wall’s riverbank route past Wilhelm I’s neo-Gothic summer palace, tricked up with battlements and towers in 1833 to indulge the Prussian aristocracy’s enthusiasm for mediaeval England. It’s now owned by a property developer unenthusiastic about sharing his views with history buffs – although he did allow Churchill’s youngest daughter, Baroness Mary Soames, to walk the parquetry floors 10 years ago in the company of the German woman whose family was evicted from the mansion in 1945 by the Soviets to make way for such eminent guests. Of the three, the grandest is Villa Urbig, Churchill’s digs, a many-gabled salmon pink chateau designed by Mies Van Der Rohe. On prime waterside streets, Scraton points out three grand homes that hosted Churchill, Truman and Stalin when they came in 1945 to carve out a new world order at the Potsdam conference. “Freies Ufer” signs – “free the shore” – are scattered along the streets, but access to the wall’s shoreline border costs millions of Euros now.

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These days, they house TV producers and software entrepreneurs, and much of the old river route is locked away in private land. Where guards once patrolled the border with guns, we wander down avenues lined with Kaiser-era mansions. We walk west into what was East Berlin, or rather the edge of the East German city of Potsdam. Wannsee was the place to which West Berliners could escape and enjoy a little open space, Scraton says – if they could ignore the watch towers on the farther shore. “Winter is coming,” everyone keeps saying, like Starks in Game of Thrones.īleak rains will arrive on schedule the next day, but the walk that Sunday would have been glorious even if we remained ignorant of its history a long ramble through grand boulevards and forested trails by the shores of a sprawling lake. The shores of Lake Wannsee are ringed with crowds, faces raised to the sun. We meet on what everyone tells us will be the last sunny day of the year. The route he’s chosen for the tour ignores the well-known inner-city route north from Checkpoint Charlie, now a Disney cartoon of its former self, for a half day exploring not only the scars left by the wall, but other layers of history, from19th-century royal pleasure palaces to Nazi sites and today’s planning disputes. Married to a woman raised in East Germany (“an Ossie”), he’s walked and blogged many of the wall’s traces. Scraton has a scholarly enthusiasm for the city’s less obvious historical stories. That, he said, is why the wall zig zagged through the city, jumping across the River Spree and back to seal off one city block from its neighbour. “The borders of East and West Berlin were decided by postcodes,” he explains when he meets the five of us at Griebnitz see train station, once a border crossing for train passengers heading for the rest of the West. I’ve signed up for a historical walk of 14 kilometres across its outer western edge, on a small group tour led by Paul Scraton, an English man who has made extensive study of the wall’s traces.

To walk the entire Mauerweg, or wall path, would take seven solid days. It’s only once I’d arrived that I understood the wall as a loop, 155 kilometres of concrete, barbed wire and watch towers that cut off West Berlin from the surrounding country, save for the patrolled roads and train lines back to the west. Growing up, I’d always imagined the Wall running straight down the middle of the city, something out of Pink Floyd. To get a better grasp of the power of a wall that divided communism and capitalism for 28 years, I take the train west, not east, to the forested suburbs of Wannsee and Babelsberg. The kilometre long stretch that still borders the Spree River has been thickly painted with murals of rainbows and doves. Up close, what remains of the Berlin Wall looks fragile for something that once divided the superpowers: 3.6 metres of concrete high and less than 50 centimetres thick. Busy beach at Strandbad in Wannsee in Berlin GermanyĪs Berlin prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the great divider, Michelle Griffin takes a lakeside walk through layers of history.

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