Berlin, the wall and the city that grew back together

On the night of 12 to 13 August 1961, Berliners went to bed in one city and woke up in two. Overnight, the East German authorities began sealing off the western sectors with barbed wire and cinder blocks, and in the weeks and months that followed the wire became a wall. It ran right through the middle of the city and all the way round West Berlin, about 155 kilometres of it, and it stood for twenty-eight years.

It came down almost by accident. On 9 November 1989 East Germany announced that the border would open, and the announcement turned into a night of spontaneous celebration at the wall. Less than a year later, on 3 October 1990, Germany was reunited.

Where the wall stood

There is surprisingly little of the wall left. Most of it was pulled down in the months and years after it opened, and new streets, parks and buildings have gone up on what was the border strip.

The best place to understand it is the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße. This street was the scene of some of the wall's tragedies and some of its great escapes. It was also here, in June 1990, that the official demolition of the border fortifications began. The memorial now covers 1.4 kilometres of the former border strip. A section of the border has been kept so that you can see what the whole system looked like, and a documentation centre tells its history.

The longest stretch still standing is in the east of the city, along the River Spree near the Oberbaumbrücke. In the spring of 1990, with the border open and the wall's future unknown, artists from twenty-one countries painted about 1.3 kilometres of it with more than a hundred murals, and the East Side Gallery was born. The best known is Dmitri Vrubel's painting of a brotherly kiss between two communist leaders, an image that has been reproduced on so many postcards that it is easy to forget how odd and bold it was at the time. Most of the paintings have since been restored or repainted, but the wall they are on is the real thing.

The checkpoints have their own stories. At Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing on Friedrichstraße used by the Allies, American and Soviet tanks faced each other across the line for several days in October 1961, a few weeks after the wall went up, before both sides pulled back without a shot being fired. A little further north on the same street, the old departure hall for travellers leaving East Berlin is known as the Tränenpalast, the Palace of Tears, for the farewells said there, and it now tells the story of the border crossing.

The city that grew back

What makes Berlin today so interesting is not only what was lost but how the city has filled the gaps. For decades, the land along the wall was a no man's land through the centre of a capital. Since 1990 it has been built on, planted and argued over, and walking the line of the wall is a way of reading the city's recent history in its architecture.

The Reichstag, the old parliament building of 1894, had been burned in 1933 and badly damaged in the war. After reunification it was rebuilt for the German parliament, the Bundestag, to designs by Norman Foster, who gave it a new glass dome, letting daylight down into the building. The Bundestag held its first session there in 1999. A parliament under a glass roof, open to the sky, is about as clear a statement of intent as an architect could make.

Holidays that include Berlin

Just You's seven-night Imperial Bohemia, Saxony & Berlin combines the Czech Republic and Germany. Its places include Prague, Karlovy Vary and Marianske Lazne, Plzen, Dresden, Moritzburg and Meissen, and Berlin.

Ambassador Cruise Line's fourteen-night Scandinavian Cities & Baltic Discoveries sails from London Tilbury in August, calling at Copenhagen, Gdynia, Gdansk, Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, Warnemünde, Berlin and Fredericia.

If you have only a day, go to Bernauer Straße first and see what the border was. Then walk on into the centre, and see how much of the city has grown up in the space where the wall used to be.