Go Culture:A cycle along the route of the Berlin Wall is a great way to unravel the logic of the German capital, writes Louise East
WALLS, FOR the most part, do not make great tourist attractions. They may do sterling work holding roofs up and keeping invaders out, but bricks and mortar are not exactly the stuff of a riveting slide show.
Walls that do make the guide-books - the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Wailing Wall - earn star billing by virtue of their symbolic as much as their aesthetic value.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Berlin, a city to which tourists are drawn in their masses to a wall that no longer exists.
Nineteen years ago last week, live footage of bleached-denim-clad teenagers scrambling over a concrete behemoth dominated the evening news. In one November night, the wall that had divided communist east Berlin from capitalist west for 28 years lost its power.
In the weeks and months that followed, the Berlin Wall was torn down with earnest efficiency, its symbolism too potent to be tolerated a moment longer. Now, Berlin is a city famous for its absences; the wall that is not there, the bunker until recently unmarked, the mighty architecture lost to Allied bombs.
What cannot be erased is the route the wall once took through the city, cutting through tramlines, canals and back gardens, often with an absurd, illogical cruelty.
Cycling the route makes sense. In total, the wall was 160km long; the section running through the city centre amounted to some 32km, all of it flat and most of it covered by a cycle path. Several of Berlin's must-see sights are on or near the route, and cycling what was once an impregnable boundary goes a long way towards unravelling the logic of the city.
Berlin has not been slow to pick up on interest in the wall, and there are several websites, tours and guidebooks that show you where to go. I signed up with Fat Tire Bike Tours and was issued a colourful Beach Cruiser bike, complete with handlebars as wide as buffalo horns and a fat squashy saddle.
Bike tours take 4½ hours, but the pace is leisurely and there's no fitness or experience requirement; several anxious riders in my group were swooping like swallows by the end of the tour.
As Fat Tire's dedicated Berlin wall tour had finished for the season, I joined its year-round city tour, which follows a good chunk of the wall route, starting with Checkpoint Charlie, the infamous Allied checkpoint.
It was here that US and Soviet tanks faced off in October 1961, an iconic Cold War moment now promoted with grimly ironic capitalist fervour. You can have your passport "stamped" by an actor wearing the uniform of a GDR border guard, or pay a couple of euro to have your photo taken alongside a reconstruction of the US army guardhouse.
The buildings all around illustrate Berlin's frenzy of reconstruction, but an on-street exhibition of photos, maps and personal histories goes some way to reconstructing the windswept menace of the former border crossings.
From Friedrichstrasse, we turn down Zimmerstrasse, following a double row of chestnut-brown cobblestones. These crop up throughout the city, indicating where the wall once ran, and they are never less than poignant, their simplicity in stark contrast to the impenetrable wall they represent.
Our next stop is at Niederkirchnerstrasse, where several metres of wall still stand, 12ft tall, and topped with a distinctive tube of re-enforced concrete. In a strange reversal of fortunes, it is now the wall that is sealed off with a wire fence, designed to protect it from the Mauerspechte or "wall-peckers" - people determined to chisel off a souvenir.
Just beyond the strip of wall lies an empty square of wasteland, and a few razed remains of the Prinz Albrecht Palais, once the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS. When the building was torn down, a series of cells used as torture chambers were revealed; these foundations now host a series of photos and information panels called, rather luridly, the Topography of Terror.
It's a bleak spot, haunted by the strange desolation of a tourist sight dedicated not to pleasure but remembrance. Yet the mood of the tour is light. Somehow, Mike, our tour guide, manages to weave humour through his account of Berlin's grim past, and there's something rather uplifting about cruising the city's streets in a gang of cyclists.
Right now, Mike pulls our thoughts out of those grim foundations and directs them to a window high up in a stern Nazi-built block across the street. From here an East German office clerk managed to fly his family across the wall to the West, by posting each out the window on a hastily secured zip-wire. Another escapee managed to drive his low-slung sports car neatly under the checkpoint barrier. From Niederkirchnerstrasse, the wall route takes us past one of only five remaining guard towers of the 300 that once watched the notorious Death Strip just inside the wall, and into Potsdamer Platz, home of Germany's first electric traffic light, a few lone panels of the wall and several glass and steel sky-scrapers.
We cycle on, past the undulating concrete slabs of the Jewish Memorial and down the side of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburger Gate. Built in 1789 and intended to recall ancient Greece, the Brandenburg Gate is now indelibly associated with the celebrations that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In fact, its inclusion in the iconography of the Cold War is rather arbitrary; for much of its length, the wall was only a brick-width wide, but in front of the Gate, it stood a couple of metres thick, making it a good place to drink champagne and party.
At this point, the Fat Tire city tour parts ways with the wall route to ride through Berlin's many other sights, so the next day I head out with my own bike and a guidebook to explore another section of the wall.
Oberbaumbrücke spans the River Spree, a beautiful, two-storey red brick edifice of arches and spires, connecting Kreuzberg in the west and Friedrichshain in the east. In December 1963, after two years of complete isolation, West Berliners were finally granted one-day visas to visit their relatives in the East across this bridge.
Running along the edge of the river on the Friedrichshain side is the longest surviving stretch of wall, a 1.3km stretch now known as the East Side Gallery due to its technicolour skin of protest graffiti, including Birgit Kinder's iconic painting of a Trabant car blasting west in a shower of bricks.
Backed by a four-lane highway and much supplemented by the biros of tourists, the wall is depressingly shabby in places, but days before my visit a facelift was announced. Funding of €2.2 million is in place, and the call has gone out asking the original artists to return and restore their work.
I leave the East Side Gallery and take a short cut north to Bernauer Strasse. Light is fading fast but I want to see this particular street, a primer to the absurdity of building a wall through a city. When the residents of Bernauer Strasse woke up on the morning of August 13th, 1961, they discovered that the houses on the south side of the street were in East Berlin but the pavement below was in the West.
As fast as people jumped out the windows, the authorities bricked them up, until finally, 58-year-old Ida Siekmann jumped from her third-floor window, later dying from her injuries. There's little to see at present-day Bernauer Street bar a plaque describing two secret passageways, called Tunnels 29 and 57 after the number of people who made it through.
But perhaps here more than anywhere else in central Berlin you get a sense of what it was like back when the wall scored a line through the city centre. No shiny new buildings have covered over the death strip and it remains a dusty, weed-strewn wasteland, too wide to shout across. I park my bike and scout around until I find them, two lines of cobblestones disappearing into the wilderness.
Go there: Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies to Berlin-Schönefeld airport from Dublin. Aer Lingus (ww.aerlingus.com) flies to Berlin-Schönefeld airport from Cork and Dublin
Where to stay, eat and go if you visit Berlin
Where to stay
East Side Hotel(6 Mühlenstrasse, Friedrichshain (00-49-30-293833; www.eastsidehotel.de) is so close to the East Side Gallery you can read the graffiti from your room. Doubles from €70.
City Stay Hostel(16 Rosenstrasse, 00-49-30-23624031, www.citystay.de) is a clean, well-located hostel that makes the most of its renovated 1896 building. Dorm rooms from €17, en-suite doubles from €32.
Hotel Riehmers Hofgarten, (83 Yorckstrasse, Kreuzberg, 00-49-30-78098800, www.riehmers-hofgarten.de) is in a very pretty courtyard in an area thick with cafes and restaurants. Singles from €98, doubles from €129.
Ostel(5 Wriezener Karree, Mitte, 00-49-30-25768660, www.ostel.eu). Travel back in time with this hotel, which recreates life in the GDR. Dorm beds from €9, en-suite doubles from €61.
Ackselhaus(21 Belforter Strasse, Prenzlauer Berg, 00-49-30-44337633, www.ackselhaus.de). Super-chic apartments and suites in one of the prettiest parts of the former East Berlin. Doubles from €100.
Where to eat
Grossbeerenkeller.
90 Grossbeerenstrasse, Kreuzberg, 00-49-30-2513064. A Berlin institution since 1862, and handily close to the wall route.
Café Adler. 206 Friedrich Strasse, Kreuzberg, 00-49-30-2518965. A useful stop-off point, just beside Checkpoint Charlie, for coffee, cake and calm.
Witty's. Wittenbergplatz, Charlottenberg. Judging by the queues at this stand, Witty's organic sausages are definite contenders for the title of Berlin's best wurst.
Borchardt. 47 Französische Strasse, Mitte, 00-49-30-81886262. Swish, buzzy and central.
Pasternak. 22-24 Knaackstrasse, Prenzlauer Berg, 00-49-30-4413399. A cosy place to tuck into beef stroganoff and blinis.
Where to go
• Art is big in Berlin right now. A major Jeff Koons retrospective has just opened in the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie (50 Potsdamer Strasse, 00-49-30-2662652, www.neue-nationalgalerie.de) while Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys make unusual bedfellows at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart Berlin (50-51 Invalidenstrasse, 00-49-30-39783411, www.hamburgerbahnhof.de).
• On Sunday, shops shut in Berlin. Instead, head to Boxhagener Platz in Friedrichshain, where Berliners like to forage in the flea market and linger over brunch.
• To get a great view of the city, climb the Norman Foster-designed dome at the Reichstag. It's worth doing, but be prepared to queue.
• The DDR (GDR) museum (1 Karl-Liebknecht Strasse 00-49-30-847123731, www.ddr-museum.de) offers a hands-on introduction to life in the former East Germany, from Trabis to gherkins.
On your bike
• Fat Tire Bike Tours Berlin (00-49-30-24047991, www.fattirebiketoursberlin.com) offer bike tours all-year-round (€20 per person). Their Berlin Wall tour restarts on May 1st, or they can organise a private guide. Bike hire €12 per day.
• Cycline's Berlin Wall Trail(Esterbauer, €12.99) is a guide to cycling the wall route, available in English.
Irish connectionCheck out Ard Bia Berlin (39 Chodowieckistrasse, 00-49-30-4862537, www.ardbiaberlin.com). The Berlin off-shoot of Galway's Ard Bia gallery is hosting artists talks all winter.