Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin gave us a choice.
We could treat it like a bonafide museum, or even a historic site.
Or we could nod our heads, laugh, and wish for better things.
We did both.
What IS Checkpoint Charlie?
When we took our 2018 vacation, we thought we were following Martin Luther’s Reformation trail.
We did that (learning far more than we expected along the way).
But, we also discovered our daughter didn’t know much about the Cold War.
Which means she’d never heard of Checkpoint Charlie. “What is it?”
It was the most well-known border crossing site between East and West Berlin between 1947 and 1991.
According to Wikipedia, it:
became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West.
Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.
On June 26, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited Checkpoint Charlie and looked from a platform onto the Berlin Wall and into East Berlin.
Why the name?
The name Checkpoint Charlie comes from the NATO phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie).
After the border crossings at Helmstedt-Marienborn (Alpha) and Dreilinden-Drewitz (Bravo), Checkpoint Charlie was the third checkpoint opened by the Allies in and around Berlin.
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Espionage
The site of many escape attempts (usually in a car), the crossing served as the crucial setting in many Cold War stories, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. (It’s in the opening scene of the movie).
No one from Eastern Bloc countries was allowed to cross there. In addition, western officials, military personnel, and even my (then) teenage brother could only cross into East Berlin at the checkpoint.
The DDR had their own checkpoint a few yards away in East Berlin. On their side, they employed mirrors and listening devices to check under cars going into the west. They often searched trucks and emptied the contents lest someone escape.
American soldiers who stood at Checkpoint Charlie were forbidden from helping anyone escaping. Too often, they stood by, helpless, while the East German police, the Stasi, arrested people seeking to escape.
A restaurant on the corner served as a spot for Allied authorities to keep an eye on the crossing.
What’s it like now?
When the Berlin Wall blockade ended on November 9, 1989, Checkpoint Charlie’s value became moot.
It remained the major crossing for about a year, until German reunification.
The original guard shack came down in 1990, and the area was remade into a tourist attraction.
Which is what we visited in 2018.
We had not realized until we reached the open-air exhibit that we’d spent our entire vacation in the eastern sector.
So, our daughter demonstrated what happened when we walked through the checkpoint.
The rebuilt guard shack is now manned by actors in army uniforms.
An American flag flies.
People walk back and forth.
Typical of a border crossing.
Checkpoint Charlie Explanations
I’m not sure it really was a museum, but in the block leading up to the crossing, large posters lined a wooden fence explaining the story (and showing photos, like the one above).
We learned quite a bit as we walked along, glancing up from time to time at the jaunty American flag flying over the shack in the middle of the street.
Crowds wandered around, stopping to buy trinkets (like the one on the left that now graces our refrigerator), and think about what used to happen at this spot.
The area is one of the most visited tourist spots in Berlin!
And right beside the checkpoint is a Museum of the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie.
But there’s a sober side, as well.
Far too many people died trying to escape to freedom at the guard shack or over the Berlin Wall.
The haunting photos were more important than the photo opp and I stood looking across the guard shack for a long time, just thinking of the lost lives.
What was Berlin like?
I know two stories about the capital of Germany from the years when the wall and checkpoint kept the west at bay.
One friend attended elementary school the day her mother went shopping in East Berlin, against her husband’s advice.
He knew the East German government suspected him. “If you get arrested, I can’t do anything about it.”
“Oh, who would arrest me?” the mom laughed.
The DDR’s Stasi.
She spent the night in jail before US diplomatic officials could get her released.
Her husband shrugged. “I told you so.”
Another friend lived in West Berlin in the mid-1980s. “The air was always black and nasty in the wintertime,” she told me not long after the wall came down. “They only had soft coal to burn, and when everyone lit their heaters, the air pollution was terrible.”
I remember the stories after the wall came down. People flooded across the border from East Berlin, amazed at the items anyone could purchase in a store.
Some people drove their Trabis into the west and hoisted them into trash dumpsters.
They sang Beethoven’s 5th Symphony song, “Ode to Joy.”
It was a wonderful, liberating fall.
And the world no longer needed a Checkpoint Charlie.
Today, there’s a McDonald’s restaurant overlooking the site.
Tweetables
A fun, yet poignant, visit to Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie. Click to Tweet
A reminder of the Cold War, with McDonald’s in the background. Click to Tweet
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