Post by Anna Munson: the Ghost Stations

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. 

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.  

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 9^th. 

As a history major particularly interested in Germany and in the 20^th 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!