SS-Bicycle-Man5

     The early afternoon sun warmed me as we began to glide our way up Ebert Strasse. A more interesting place
to be in the world at that moment, I could not imagine. The Brandenburg Gate lay directly in front of us. Through
the gate to the east along Unter den Linden Strasse, we would see the grand palaces of the kaisers, and
Humboldt University, where Einstein studied and taught. Further on and across the river Spree is Alexanderplatz,
with its ornate arched bridge and six white marble statues, each one signifying a different stage of the life of
Alexander the Great. There are cathedrals and the Berlin Opera House, which miraculously survived the
devastating bombings of Berlin with barely a brick knocked out of place. To my left was the Tiergarten, with its
wide lawn leading up to magnificent statues and winding pathways, and then to my right, just past the Holocaust
Memorial, were the stately embassies of Great Britain and the United States, and many fine shops, hotels, and
restaurants.
     Despite the grand surroundings, I couldn’t shake the realization that on this calm, beautiful September day, I
was being taxied across land where the inhumane Berlin Wall once stood. How could cars, buses, and taxicabs
look so ordinary as they zipped past this place? How could so many people nonchalantly walk and shop and
scurry home from work through this zone of past horrors?
“Excuse me!” I called to the my courier.
     “Ja?”
     “Where exactly was the wall?”
     “The Berlin Wall, ja?”
     “Yes, the Berlin Wall.”
     “Look there in the middle of the strasse,” said my driver, who now seemed to be speaking English better than
just a little bit. “You see the bricks in the street, ja? This place is where the wall was.”
     “Yes, I see.”
     “I will wait for no cars, and then I’ll ride you to the wall.”
     “Gute,” I said, using my one German word.
     When traffic cleared, the cyclist quickly pedaled his way from the right shoulder, where we had been slowly
cruising along, directly into the middle of Ebert Strasse. He steered the front tire of the bicycle between the two
rows of gray bricks where the Berlin Wall once stood. He followed the mortared groove between the blocks like a
train on tracks, the bicycle bumping along.
     “So now we are riding on the Berlin Wall, ja?” He drove us for a short distance along the wall’s path. Then,
looking partially over his shoulder to make sure I could hear him, he called out: “To the left, West Berlin. To the
right, East Berlin.”
     “Where did you live?” I called back to him over the whoosh of the air and the background sounds of Berlin.
     “I lived in East Berlin since 1952, before the wall, and then the wall went up in 1961, and then in 1989, the
wall came down in one day. It was November 9, 1989, just like that, ja. The wall is gone, ja, today. But I ride the
wall like this to tell my mind, ja, that the wall is gone, so the wall inside me can go away too.”
     “Amazing,” I replied, bemused.
     He was so right—that even though the physical wall has been reduced to a row of harmless-looking Belgium
blocks, it still exists in the consciousness of those who lived with it. What a strange life it must have been to have
seen it daily and coexist with it for all those long years. So I had come looking for the Berlin Wall and found it in a
place I had never expected, in the minds and souls and memories of Berliners like the bicycle man and the
millions of others who had watched the wall go up, lived through the horrible divisions in families that it caused,
and were there to see it come crumbling down suddenly and without warning one afternoon. After 28 long, hard
years, all the checkpoints were opened and the wall fell, beginning at Brandenburg Gate and continuing on for
100 miles, the crumbling spreading as fast as a wild brush fire in a windstorm.