Bernauer Straße

Where it runs. Bernauer Straße is a straight, unremarkable-looking city street about 1.4 kilometres long in the north of central Berlin, running roughly north-east from Gartenstraße near Nordbahnhof to the Mauerpark at Schwedter Straße. It divides the district of Mitte on its south side from Wedding on the north. Nothing about the streetscape today — a mix of postwar blocks, new apartment buildings, a tram line and a broad grassed strip — explains why this address appears in every history of the Cold War. The explanation lies in a nineteenth-century administrative boundary. When Berlin's districts were drawn, the line between them was set not along the centre of the roadway but along the southern building line. After 1945 that made the houses on the south side Soviet-sector property and the pavement in front of their doors part of the French sector. The border ran through their front doorsteps.

13 August 1961 and after. When the barrier went up overnight, people on Bernauer Straße found that leaving their own front door meant crossing an international frontier. For a few weeks they simply did it. Then the ground-floor doors and windows were bricked up, and residents began going out of the upper windows instead, dropping onto West Berlin pavement while the fire brigade held jump sheets below and photographers waited. Ida Siekmann, aged 58, threw her bedding from the window of number 48 on 22 August 1961 and jumped after it; she died of her injuries and is counted as the first fatality of the Berlin Wall. Bernd Lünser was shot at on the roof of number 44 in October 1961 and fell, missing the net. The buildings were emptied by late September, sealed, and demolished floor by floor between 1963 and 1965 until only their façades remained as part of the barrier, and then not even that. The famous photograph of the border guard Conrad Schumann vaulting a coil of barbed wire — taken by Peter Leibing on 15 August 1961 at the corner of Ruppiner Straße, in the third day of the barrier's existence — was made on this street.

The tunnels, and a television network. Because the ground here is sandy and the distance between cellars on either side was short, Bernauer Straße became the centre of the Berlin tunnel effort. Two attempts are famous. In September 1962 a group of students dug from a disused factory cellar on Schönholzer Straße under the border to a courtyard on Bernauer Straße; twenty-nine people came through, and the operation is known as Tunnel 29. It was financed by the American network NBC, whose crews filmed the digging and the escape underground by the light of hand-held lamps and broadcast the result as The Tunnel in December 1962 — a documentary the Kennedy administration tried to suppress, and one of the strangest examples on record of a broadcaster paying for the event it was covering. Two years later Tunnel 57 ran from a derelict bakery at Bernauer Straße 97 to a rear courtyard on Strelitzer Straße; fifty-seven people escaped over two nights in October 1964 before the tunnel was betrayed and an East German border guard, Egon Schultz, was shot dead in the confusion — a death the GDR used for propaganda for decades while concealing that he had been hit by a fellow guard's fire.

On screen. The imagery of Bernauer Straße is the imagery of the Wall itself, and it circulated worldwide because the western pavement gave camera crews an unobstructed line of sight into the East. The 2001 German feature Der Tunnel, directed by Roland Suso Richter, dramatises the Tunnel 57 escape and remains the most widely seen fiction treatment of the street. The NBC documentary is preserved and excerpted in the exhibition here. Later films that recreate the Wall's construction — Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015) among them — build their sets from photographs taken on this pavement, and the mental picture most people carry of the Wall, a woman lowered from a window or a soldier jumping wire, comes from a stretch of asphalt you can now walk in ten minutes.

What you actually see today. Since 2014 the southern side of the street has been laid out as a continuous open-air memorial landscape, with rusted steel rods tracing the vanished Wall, the exposed cellars of the demolished houses, a preserved section of the full border strip at Ackerstraße, and the Chapel of Reconciliation on the site of the church that stood in the death strip until 1985. Marker plates in the ground name the tunnels and the people who died. The eastern end runs into the Mauerpark, laid out on the former death strip in the 1990s and now best known for its Sunday flea market and open-air karaoke.

Getting there. U-Bahn U8 stops at Bernauer Straße halfway along; the S-Bahn at Nordbahnhof serves the western end, with its own exhibition on the ghost stations; and the M10 tram runs the full length. The street is level, entirely free to walk, and rewards being covered on foot rather than by bicycle.