Checkpoint Charlie and the Topography of Terror: Marked or Hidden

The full story of Checkpoint Charlie and the Topography of Terror: Marked or Hidden, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.

1. 1. Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: The Field's Edge

   Welcome to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where this walk begins. Across the road is the edge of its field: rows of gray concrete blocks, called stelae, rising away from you between the trees. The field is open day and night, and it is free.

   The memorial was designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman and opened in May two thousand five, in memory of up to six million Jewish victims.

   Look at the blocks nearest the road. They are low, some barely above the ground. Further in, they stand far taller than a person, up to four point seven meters. Yet every block has the same footprint, a little under a meter wide and about two and a half meters long, and each leans by up to two degrees. What changes is the height of each block, and the ground beneath it. The floor of the field was lowered unevenly, so the paths dip as you walk in, and the blocks close over your head. There are about twenty-seven hundred of them, set in a grid.

   Eisenman has declined to give the field one fixed meaning. The foundation that runs it asks that you walk in on foot, slowly and quietly.

   Under the field is the Information Center, free, open Tuesday to Sunday and closed on Mondays. In its Room of Names, names of murdered Jews are shown and short life stories read aloud. The foundation says that reading the name and story of every victim this way would take about six years, seven months and twenty-seven days.

   This ground was once the ministers' gardens of the government quarter, just north of the Reich Chancellery. The rest of the walk goes into that quarter.

   Follow the route away from the field, down the side street toward the apartment blocks.

2. 2. Führerbunker Site: A Car Park and a Board

   Cross the quiet side street, where there are no lights, and walk on to the information board beside the car park, and stop there.

   There is nothing else to see, and that is deliberate. Under this car park and the apartment blocks around it lay the garden of the Reich Chancellery, and under the garden, a bunker. It was begun in nineteen thirty-five on a much smaller scale and grew into a set of rooms behind walls more than four meters thick. Adolf Hitler took his own life in it on the thirtieth of April, nineteen forty-five, as Soviet troops closed in.

   After the war, Soviet soldiers blew up most of the bunker. In the nineteen eighties, what remained was filled with rubble, and the apartment blocks went up around it in East Berlin's last years. Nothing can be entered, and nothing is meant to be.

   For sixty-one years, the city put up no sign at all. Officials feared that any marker would turn the place into a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. In June two thousand six, after years of lobbying, a private association that researches Berlin's underground spaces was allowed to put up this board. It is plain on purpose: a chronology, drawings and photographs, in German and English. At the unveiling, a historian working with the association called the popular stories of a twelve-floor bunker with an underground highway complete nonsense. The association said it wanted to demystify the site.

   So the place is marked as plainly as it could be, by a board that draws nobody in.

   Read the board from the pavement. The car park is private and residents drive in and out here, so keep clear of the entrance.

   Follow the route between the apartment blocks and through a passage under one of them, toward Wilhelmstrasse.

3. 3. Georg Elser Marker: A Profile in Steel

   Come out of the passage and walk on toward the tall steel outline, stop by its information board, and look up.

   At first it looks like a thin steel frame, more than seventeen meters tall. Against the sky it turns into the outline of a man's head in profile. The man is Georg Elser, a carpenter from Swabia.

   In nineteen thirty-eight, Elser decided on his own to kill Hitler and two of his closest men, to prevent a war. Over weeks in the summer of nineteen thirty-nine, he secretly prepared a pillar in a Munich beer hall and built his own bomb into it. On the eighth of November, nineteen thirty-nine, two months into the war, Hitler left the hall minutes before the explosion. Eight people were killed. That evening, customs officers arrested Elser at Constance as he tried to reach Switzerland. He was imprisoned for more than five years and murdered at Dachau concentration camp on the ninth of April, nineteen forty-five. The German Resistance Memorial Center says there is no doubt that he acted entirely of his own accord.

   This marker was unveiled on the eighth of November, two thousand eleven, seventy-two years after his attempt. Its designer chose steel because Elser was a fine craftsman, and placed it so the profile reads only against the sky, not against the concrete apartment blocks around it. Lines of Elser's own words are set into the pavement and light up at night. One of them says: I wanted to prevent the war.

   The marker stands on the former grounds of the Reich Chancellery, in what its designer called the forecourt of power. Across Wilhelmstrasse lay Wilhelmplatz, the square the Chancellery faced, and on it stood the Nazi Propaganda Ministry.

   Follow the route over the small side street in front of you, looking both ways, then down Wilhelmstrasse, crossing at the lights.

4. 4. Wilhelmstrasse: The Street of Ministries

   Walk on along Wilhelmstrasse and stop by the information board on the pavement.

   This is Wilhelmstrasse. Its northern end was laid out in the seventeen thirties as a quarter of houses for Prussian officials. From the early eighteen hundreds it became the address of Prussia's most important ministries, after eighteen seventy-one of the German Empire's, and then of the Nazi state's. Along this street stood the Reich President's palace, the Foreign Office, the Reich Chancellery, the Transport Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry and the Air Ministry. On Vossstrasse, the side street at the corner you just crossed, stood the New Reich Chancellery, in use from nineteen thirty-nine to nineteen forty-five.

   Look for them. Most of them no longer exist. What stands here now is late East German housing and newer offices. In East Berlin the street even lost its name in nineteen sixty-four, and got it back only in nineteen ninety-three.

   So the street marks its own history with boards. This one belongs to a trail of thirty, called Historic Wilhelmstrasse, set up for the city in nineteen ninety-six, reworked in two thousand seven, and presented today by the Topography of Terror foundation. Each board carries an old address, photographs and a short history in German and English. Read the number on this one, and the building it describes.

   Germany's Foreign Office, looking back at its own past here, put it this way: the Nazis used the old, traditional front of Wilhelmstrasse to disguise the policies made behind its walls. And they built new as well. In the same speech, the Foreign Office called architecture here a language of seduction, intimidation and power, and named two buildings. One is the Air Ministry, and it is still standing, at the next stop.

   Follow the route on along Wilhelmstrasse, across Leipziger Strasse at the lights, and then back over Wilhelmstrasse at the next lights.

5. 5. Air Ministry: A Stone Skin on a Steel Frame

   Once across, walk on into the paved forecourt at the corner of the long, pale building, and stop near the plaque. This is the former Air Ministry of Hermann Göring, finished in nineteen thirty-six. The walls are smooth slabs of pale shell limestone, with rows of small, tall…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

6. 6. Bundesrat: A Palace for Sixteen States

   Walk on along Leipziger Strasse until the railings open onto a garden courtyard, and stop there. At the back of the courtyard is a portal of six tall columns under a triangular pediment with sculpted figures. This was built as a palace, and it is laid out like one: the main…

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7. 7. Leipziger Platz: A Wall Built for the View

   Walk on to the edge of the square and stop where the paths meet. Ahead, a few slabs of the Berlin Wall stand on the paving. This is Leipziger Platz, an eight-sided square. Early in the twentieth century, this square and Potsdamer Platz beside it were among the most important…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

8. 8. Niederkirchnerstrasse: Stone Front, Brick Back

   Walk on along the pavement to the statues on the forecourt beside you, and stop there. Across the road is the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a ticketed exhibition hall, closed on Tuesdays; the details are on this stop's card. This is Prussia's old parliament building, the elected lower…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

9. 9. Topography of Terror: The Wall Left Standing

   Walk on beside the long gray wall across the road, and stop about halfway along it. Behind that wall is the Topography of Terror, a free documentation center and outdoor exhibition; the details are on this stop's card. This is about two hundred meters of the Berlin Wall, in its…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

10. 10. Zimmerstrasse: Living on the Line

    Walk on along Zimmerstrasse and stop on the pavement, a short way before the crossroads with Friedrichstrasse. From nineteen sixty-one to nineteen ninety, the Berlin Wall ran along this street. Before that, it was an ordinary city street, at the edge of Berlin's lively…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

11. 11. Checkpoint Charlie: A Crossing Rebuilt for Visitors

    Walk on toward the crossroads and stop on the pavement. Ahead, just down Friedrichstrasse on an island in the middle of the road, is the small hut, and above the street, a tall light box with a soldier's portrait. This is Checkpoint Charlie. The Western Allies built it in…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

12. 12. Peter Fechter Memorial: A Column and a Name

    Walk on along Zimmerstrasse to the dark steel column on the pavement, and stop there. This is a place of mourning, so give it a moment of quiet. The column, two point six meters tall, and the granite slab in front of it remember Peter Fechter. He was born in Berlin in nineteen…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.