A block away from "the end of the world"

Only a few bits of the Berlin Wall are still standing. The only way you can really see how the Berlin Wall split the city in half is on certain tourist maps. As I was looking at one the other day, I noticed that the red line that marked where the Mauer once was seemed to be only a block or two away from my apartment on the map.
Then Tuesday evening I had a great conversation with Sabine about the neighborhood. It seems she has lived in this part of Kreuzberg since she came to Berlin about twenty years ago and has seen so much of the neighborhood change. She enjoys living in this part of Kreuzberg, with its eclectic mix of everyone from traditional Turkish immigrants to hippy artists and everyone else in between. She told me that her building, which once was part of social housing, was sold in July to a private owner, and that now she expects her rent to triple. The building next door was sold a little before Sabine's, and the landlord drove the previous tenants out, changed a few windows, and charged high rents to "yuppie" students--or rather the yuppie students' parents. Twenty-four buildings were sold along with Sabine's, and she said that if what happened next door happens in all twenty-four of these buildings, Kreuzberg will change forever, and not for the good in the eyes of Sabine and many of her neighbors. Don't you just love gentrification? The residents have formed a type of housing union, and have been fighting the city and the landlords, which is really inspiring.
But all of this still somewhat shocks Sabine, because she lived here before the Mauer came down. She told me, "You could go for a block in two directions, and there was the wall. No one wanted to live here; it was really the end of the world. Now everyone wants to live here." I learned so much during the conversation, about the Berlin, the neighborhood, and Sabine.
So after we talked, I naturally set off to see the Mauer--or where it once was--for myself. I walked down Adalbertstrasse in the opposite direction of the U-Bahn station. Along the way, I literally stumbled upon a "stumbling block." Carolyn pointed them out to us on our tour of Berlin on Saturday. Stumbling blocks are little gold plaques that are about the size of any other stone in the street, but they small memorials to Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. They are outside homes and other buildings, and they basically say that a victim of the Holocaust lived here when they got their deportation papers, where they were deported two, and when and where they died. They are meant for everyone to stop and remember that a person from the Holocaust actually lived here, and that now we live in the same place. This stumbling block was only about 100 meters from my apartment. I definitely mentally stumbled upon it, and I was so surprised when I saw it that I think I actually stumbled across the stones. It's language is simple but straight to the point: "Here lived Klara Winkler, born 1887, deported in 1943, killed at Auschwitz."
I walked a little further down Adalbertstrasse, remembering that Sabine said that although the Mauer doesn't stand there anymore, there is a park where it once ran. I came to the corner of Adalbertstrasse and there it was, a park the ran straight down the middle of the street. If I didn't know any better, I might have thought that it was just a neighborhood jogging path down the middle of the boulevard. There are few signs actually saying what the park signifies, just a few inconspicuous blue street signs that say "Berliner Mauerweg." As I stood on the corner of Adalbertstrasse, I realized that I was doing something that was not possible twenty years ago--I looked east down Adalbertstrasse. Then, I crossed Bethaniandamm to the park. There are no traces of the Mauer left, the park is even slightly below street level, below the foundations of the Wall. It was an intense, almost eerie feeling. But actually, I think it goes beyond using the noun "feeling." I was standing where the Berliner Mauer once stood, and for me, words can't even begin to describe what was going through my head. I tried to picture the scene twenty years ago, with the Mauer winding its way like a snake through the scene, with barbed wire and armed guards with machine guns along the top, but I really couldn't grasp it. When I crossed Adalbertstrasse into the former East Berlin, I realized that even though I did something that was impossible twenty years ago, today it is very unremarkable. If I stopped in the middle of the street trying to take it all in, I would end up as a hood ornament on one of the cars careening down Adalbertstrasse and turning onto Engeldamm! Crazy Berlin drivers! The park is now an absolutely beautiful neighborhood space, with benches hidden in small groves of trees and bushes, and jogging paths run along each side. That's what it is now, a jogging path.
There are two churches, one on either side of the park. Thomaskirche is in the former West, Michaelskirche in the former East. Both are large red brick Evangelical/Lutheran churches with large grassy parks surrounding them, but their present states are testament to the two very different histories they have, just a few hundred meters apart. I first went to Thomaskirche which is an absolutely lovely neighborhood church. There are services at 10.00 each Sunday, and on Thursdays a theater group meets that is devoted to giving voice to women's experiences. The inside is a mix of old and new, the original dome, above the new chairs and alter. It is a very welcoming space, and there are several binders near the door that have very detailed histories of the division of Berlin. Even though I had studied the building of the Mauer and the Berlin airlift in German class, it was completely different to be in Berlin, less than fifty meters from the Mauer, reading about this as local history, and although it a significant period in world history, I was reading the account of a neighborhood, of people who had experienced this; my new neighborhood, my new neighbors.
After I left Thomaskirche, I walked to Michaelskirche. When I got to the front, I was frozen in my tracks. I looked up at the facade of Michaelskirche, first at the gates that prevent anyone from entering the front, then at the mural above the doors and then through a circle where a window once was. There was nothing there. The light of day shone to the opposite side of the church, revealing only a hollow shell where the nave once stood. The church looked to have received a direct hit by a bomb, and because it was on the east side of the Mauer, it had not been restored or demolished. Just left there. On the right of the facade is a small playground. At first glance, it may seem like a ghost, a testament to the horrors of war and then a totalitarian state, but as I walked around, I found a different history being written. The back part of the church is being restored, probably so it does not collapse, people walk their dogs around the church, and small children were learning how to ride bikes across the street. Michaelskirche still looks out over its neighborhood, and is still part of the residents lives. As I was walking around, the clock struck six o'clock--the clock in the bell tower of Michaelskirche. Even though it stands on the edge of ruin, remarkably the bells still chime the hour, just as they have since the nineteenth century.
I can only imagine and begin to understand what it was like to live on Waldemarstrasse twenty years ago. It must have been rather unnerving to live so close to "enemy territory." It really was the end of the world. Life continued on both sides of the Mauer; people lived in their apartments, children played, church bells chimed--parallel lives, only audible to each other, with governments, ideologies, and fears embodied in the Mauer that separated them. Today there is no Mauer through Kreuzberg, no separation between east and west, just Berliners, their neighborhood, and their memories.