Rick Steves’ Europe: Cold War Memories in Today’s Berlin

The longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall is now the East Side Gallery.

The iconic Brandenburg Gate is the last of the original 14 gates that were part of Berlin’s old city wall. During the Cold War, the Brandenburg Gate became the symbol of a divided Berlin when it was trapped in the no-man’s-land of the Berlin Wall, between the communist East and capitalist West. Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli/TNS

Whenever I travel to Berlin I can’t help remembering my spooky Cold War visit back in 1971. I vividly recall how, after we’d toured East Berlin, our tour bus was stopped and emptied at the border so mirrors could be rolled under the bus before we returned to West Berlin. They wanted to see if anyone was trying to hitch a ride to freedom with us. (For a 16-year-old who was caught up in the anxiety of the Cold War, that left quite an impression.)

It’s been more than three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, which for nearly 30 years had divided the biggest city in Germany in two: a communist East and a capitalist West. Back then, life in the East was bleak, gray, and demoralizing because of ongoing political repression and their unresponsive Soviet-style command economy.