I live next to a ghost station. Almost every day I walk down the cement steps
and wait in the dark underground tunnel for my train to come. But there are no Soviet soldiers with machine
guns, and the S-Bahn 2 stops and allows passengers to board—because the Wall
has come down.
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| Soviet soldiers used to patrol these platforms. |
Once the Nordbahnhof station sat between the East and
West. My entrance, the Invalidenstraße one, opened onto the East, and the other one, the Bernaustraße entrance, opened
onto the West. The GDR authorities blocked off both
entrances and installed complicated alarm systems between the two to ensure that it could not be a communication point - or escape route - from East to West. They even disguised the entrance so that my
host parents, who lived in the East, forgot that there was an S-Bahn station there. The S-Bahn still ran, but only because West-Berliners
needed to travel between the north and south parts of West-Berlin. The dimly-lit station was guarded by soldiers to keep East Germans from attempting to board, which would have been difficult, since the trains did not stop, but rather slowed down.
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| The juxtaposition between the old and the new can be striking. |
The apartment in which Clementine and I live here in
Berlin is just 10 minutes walking distance from remnants of the Wall. It’s an old DDR apartment, and while Hanna
and Wilfried, my host parents, have made it comfortable and even beautiful in
its own way, it’s still far from the sleek Ikea-like interiors of many modern
German apartments. When I turn on the
shower, I hear a flame light somewhere within the wall; after about a minute
the hot water starts coming out. The
drab brown of the floors and baseboards is counteracted with bright
decorations. Hanna and Wilfried have
stories, too: about the 10-year-old Trabi they were able to buy because no one else
wanted it but that Wilfried fixed into working condition, the limited selection
of groceries then available, the party at the Wall on November 9th.
As a history major particularly interested in Germany
and in the 20th century, I’m living in seventh heaven (that is,
aside from the fact that the life of this small town girl has been drastically
different for the last 8 weeks; Munich and Berlin are no small towns,
especially not in the inner-city!).
Everywhere I go, there’s history.
We walk past Stars of David in the sidewalk marking a previous Jewish
resident in a particular house; there’s an old Jewish cemetery and a Jewish
school with a high-security system and police guards fifteen minutes from my
apartment. I cross the border between
East and West every day to get to work.
I see signs for Tempelhof airport, the site of the American
airlift. The other day as Nick, Allison,
and I were listening to street music, we noticed what must be bullet holes in
one of the stone columns lining the street.
The cemetery wall next to our apartment is topped with huge glass shards
originally installed to prevent people escaping over it.
In a few very short days we’re going to be leaving
this place of history and culture. I for
one am going to miss the cobblestones, the church bells, the thrill of working
in another language, the loving, joyful people at the Stadtmission, the little
cafes, the Aldi picnics, the beautiful Tiergarten (where I’m sitting right
now), and perhaps most of all, the fellowship that we eight students have
enjoyed: the stimulating discussions and the crazy, side-splitting, late-night
laughter. God has blessed us in incredible
ways this summer. But I’m also excited
to go back and to use the things I’ve learned in Germany in my life at home and
in my classes. Bis später, Deutschland. Grüß dich, Amerika!
