Checkpoint

A packed bus approaches Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War's most famous border crossing, as grim-faced East German guards whisper among themselves about whether to hold you for questioning. After a few heart-stopping minutes, you and your fellow passengers ar…

BERLIN: A packed bus approaches Checkpoint Charlie, the Cold War's most famous border crossing, as grim-faced East German guards whisper among themselves about whether to hold you for questioning. After a few heart-stopping minutes, you and your fellow passe…

TALLINN After a nightmarish experience last year crossing the paranoid Ukraine-Russia border, I was nervous about driving alone from Moscow to Estonias capital, Tallinn early September to sell my Peugeot, which I had bought there five years ago. Estonia is a …

One of the most remarkable things about the Berlin Wall is that there is so little of it left. It has now been down for longer than it stood, but the moment it fell, it reshaped the mental map not just of Berlin, but of the entire continent of Europe.…

On to Berlin! we used to scream in the Sixties, standing on the car seat and sticking our heads out of the sunroof pretending to be Monty after D Day in 1944. To my generation and that of our parents Berlin was a place to be visited only by tank.…

I own a 1965 Baedeker guide to Berlin. Like all Baedekers its superbly detailed, a model of pragmatic advice and scrupulous information. Its also a historical artefact as it was published just four years after the Berlin Wall went up. Here, in precise, neutra…

30 years ago this year, the Berlin Wall the most tangible symbol of Cold War division fell. Four years later, I was born several thousand kilometers away in the American Midwest into a world no longer divided by the Iron Curtain. Little did I know that I woul…

The German Democratic Republic, or GDR, also simply known as East Germany, was founded as a second German state on October 7, 1949  four years after the end of the Second World War. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), or more commonly known as West Germany…

With its iconic glittering sphere, the TV Tower looks over the once divided city that has been reunited since 1990. The 365-meter-high (1,198-foot-high) Fernsehturm on Alexander Platz in East Berlin was almost 220 meters taller than West Berlin's broadcasting…

Berlin today is one of the world's hippest, most affluent cities - a cultural powerhouse and a mecca for party animals. But just over 30 years ago it was a city torn in two, divided by a wall measuring 91 miles. On one side was capitalist West Berlin, on the…