Wallpeckers
By Diana Ellis
 “In Berlin we don’t have woodpeckers; we have wallpeckers,”
or so Eva, a native Berliner, tells me. People come to the Berlin Wall with
picks and hammers trying to take home a piece of history. I can understand how
they feel. I have thought about doing this myself. Why pay twenty Euro dollars
for a small piece of the wall when you can get your own much larger piece free.
I first saw the Berlin Wall, or part of it, in New York
City. It was next to a memorial from the World Trade Center. Two pieces of
history side by side. A piece of the Berlin Wall and some beams from the World
Trade Center. The piece of wall was about six feet tall and three feet wide. It
had an eye painted on it. Stalin’s eye watching for defectors during the cold
war.
 In
Berlin, most of the wall was taken down on November 9, 1989. I watched it on
television. Part of me was sad because it had come down before I had a chance to
see it. Another part cheered the people who were dismantling it, wishing I could
be there helping. Sixteen years later I have finally made it to Berlin. A
different Berlin than I imaged. I had grown up watching movies about the cold
war where the divided city and the infamous wall figured prominently. The Berlin
I now see is united. Some of the wall still stands but is a tourist attraction,
not a political statement. I am staying in a hotel in East Berlin, but it is not
necessary for me to go through border control at Check Point Charlie to get
there. It is hard to tell East and West Berlin apart now because they look so
much alike and the wall is no longer there to divide them.
 The Second World War was a distant memory by the time I was
born, but the cold war raged in full force. The news regularly contained stories
about people trying to defect to the West. News footage showed people being shot
in the “no-man’s land” between East and West Germany. Armed guards patrolled the
border. They were always shown walking along the inside of the wall carrying
machine guns and leading their vicious looking dogs. Check Point Charlie was the
main crossing point in Berlin where all the action happened in the movies and
the newsreels. Manned by Americans on the West and communist troops on the East,
it represented the superpower standoff that was at the heart of the cold war.
Spies from both sides regularly slipped across the border here. At least they
did in the movies I watched.
 Seeing the wall now, I do not find it imposing. It has
lost the ability that it had to induce terror in people’s hearts. It is a
concrete structure that stands nearly nine feet high. At the top, there is a
cylinder shaped border that is covered with barbed wire. It is made of concrete
panels that were pre-poured and assembled practically overnight in August 1961.
Much of the wall that faces the West was painted with murals that protested the
very existence of the wall. They are still there. The art work is surprisingly
good.
 The
Berlin wall stood for twenty-eight years, two months and twenty-seven days. It
was 155 kilometers long. It separated not only East and West Berlin but the
German State of Brandenburg as well. It was built to stop the migration of
people from East to West. These may be the historical facts but not the image of
the wall that remains in my mind. To me it represents the cold war, a world
divided by ideology. When the Berlin wall came down, the Soviet Union fell soon
afterwards and the cold war ended.
I will leave Berlin with my own piece of the wall. I bought
it in a souvenir shop next to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. It is a small piece
of concrete painted with rainbow colors and comes with a certificate of
authenticity. Now I too am a wall pecker.
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