Checkpoint

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…

There is one story that the Berlin Wall fell when it did, almost 30 years ago, thanks to Ronald Reagan standing in front of the divided city's Brandenburg Gate with a bold challenge: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" But there is another story. It's not …

Where guard towers and barbed wire once stood, runners pouned the 160 km path along the former Berlin Wall on Saturday. Around 500 runners, started the 8th edition of the Berlin Wall Race, ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Walls demise this November. Wit…

Where guard towers and barbed wire once stood, runners pounded the 100-mile (160 kilometre) path along the former Berlin Wall this weekend in a race with victims of the Cold War relic at its heart. On Saturday at 6:00 am (0400 GMT), around 500 runners, start…

The race is part ultra-marathon, part tribute to those who died trying to cross the Wall, which the East German communist regime hastily erected in 1961 and stood for 28 years. Precious little of the original concrete structure remains, most of it hurriedly …

Race to remember Berlin Wall victims, 30 years on