Glienicke Bridge

Where it sits. The Glienicke Bridge crosses the Havel at the narrow point where the river links the Jungfernsee to the Glienicker Lake, joining the Berlin district of Wannsee on the eastern bank to Potsdam's Berliner Vorstadt on the western one. It is not a large structure — a steel through-truss of three spans, some 128 metres long — and it carries an ordinary two-lane road with pavements on both sides. What makes it remarkable is the setting and the line it draws. The banks on either side are parkland laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné: Glienicke Park with Schinkel's Schloss Glienicke on the Berlin shore, Babelsberg Park with its neo-Gothic palace on the Potsdam side. From the middle of the bridge the view is of water, reeds, willows and nineteenth-century Prussian landscape design, which is a strange frame for what happened here.

The story behind it. A wooden bridge stood at this crossing from the seventeenth century; Karl Friedrich Schinkel replaced it with a stone one in 1834 as part of the ensemble of royal parks along the Havel. The present steel bridge was built between 1904 and 1907 to carry heavier traffic and was named the Bridge of Unity, Brücke der Einheit, by the East German authorities after it was rebuilt in 1949 from war damage — a name that became bleakly ironic. From 1952 the crossing was closed to ordinary traffic. After 1961 it lay directly on the border between West Berlin and the GDR and was reserved for the Allied military missions, diplomats and a handful of officials. The border ran across the middle, and because the two sides maintained their own halves the paintwork never quite matched: the West Berlin half and the East German half were finished in subtly different shades of green, and the join is still faintly visible if you know to look.

Three exchanges. The bridge earned its nickname long before Hollywood used it. Three prisoner exchanges took place here:

• 10 February 1962 — the Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel, convicted in New York, was traded for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over Sverdlovsk in 1960. The American student Frederic Pryor was released simultaneously at Checkpoint Charlie as part of the same deal, negotiated by the Brooklyn insurance lawyer James B. Donovan.
• 12 June 1985 — twenty-three agents held in Poland and East Germany were exchanged for four Eastern Bloc agents, the largest swap of the Cold War.
• 11 February 1986 — the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky, later Natan Sharansky, was released with three Western agents in return for five Eastern Bloc operatives; he famously zigzagged across the line rather than walking straight, having been told to go directly across.

The bridge reopened to ordinary traffic on 10 November 1989, the day after the border was breached.

On screen. Steven Spielberg filmed the climax of Bridge of Spies (2015) on this bridge, closing it for several nights in November and December 2014 with Tom Hanks as Donovan and Mark Rylance as Abel, and shooting the 1962 exchange within a few metres of where it actually took place — an unusually literal reconstruction for a studio picture, and one made possible by how little the structure has changed. The production also used Babelsberg Studio, a fifteen-minute drive away in Potsdam, which opened in 1912 and is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world; Fritz Lang shot Metropolis there in 1925–26 and Marlene Dietrich made The Blue Angel there in 1930. Long before the film, the bridge's Cold War role had made it a fixture of espionage fiction and of television reporting, and the phrase "bridge of spies" was in journalistic use from the 1960s.

What you actually see today. Walking across takes four minutes and is free. A line on the roadway and bronze plaques at each end mark the former border; an information pavilion on the Berlin side, run in cooperation with the Potsdam museums, explains the exchanges. Both banks reward a longer stay. Schloss Glienicke, built by Schinkel for Prince Carl of Prussia from 1826 in an Italianate villa style and surrounded by Lenné's park with its Casino, Great Curiosity rotunda and gilded lions at the gate, is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site covering the palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin. Across the water, Babelsberg Park climbs a wooded slope to the palace Schinkel and Ludwig Persius built for the future Emperor Wilhelm I.

Getting there and timing. Bus 316 runs to the bridge from Wannsee S-Bahn station, and bus 93 and tram 93 reach it from Potsdam Hauptbahnhof; both approaches take about fifteen minutes. Havel excursion boats pass beneath in season. Early morning mist on the water is the classic photograph, taken from the Glienicke Park bank looking across at the truss; late afternoon light falls on the Potsdam side. Combine the visit with Schloss Cecilienhof and the New Garden, twenty minutes north, for a full Cold War and Prussian day.