Saturday, 25 October 2003

Berlin: Today the only way you can tell where the Berlin Wall once stood is to look for differences in architecture: The Wall, and the "death zone" behind it, were on a stripe of Grade A Prime real estate through the middle of downtown Berlin, and the construction cranes swooped in almost moments after reunification. This strip of pavement marks where the Wall bisected and ruined a public plaza (Potsdamer Platz), which now contains an IMAX theatre, Sony building, luxury hotel, and so forth.

Climbing a TV tower in the former East Berlin, we can see the horrors of Soviet high-rise construction: It looks like someone took a giant cookie cutter and stamped out several dozen copies of the same ugly building. The Soviets never executed a Marshall Plan for the countries that fell into their grip, and Communist economic theories didn't exactly lift all boats, so the post-war ruins were still standing in some places when Germany was glued back together. A lot of Germany's present-day economic problems are lingering indigestion from having swallowed an entire Eastern Bloc country; unemployment in the former East runs as high as 25% in some places, and efforts to modernize, rebuild, and educate are still underway.

Posted on November 11th.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:00 am. comments.