To pause now next to the monumental Brandenburg Gate is to find yourself standing on what was once the fault-line running through the heart of Europe. The point where two competing ideologies of the 20th century, capitalism and communism, clashed as they balanced on the ruins of a third, defeated and discredited, dogma – that of National Socialism.
The death strip of the Berlin Wall that once surrounded the Brandenburg Gate is no more. Gone are the border guards of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) tasked with shooting traitors escaping to the West – replaced with selfie-shooting tourists and street performers posing for photos.
The past, it has been said, is a foreign country. In the case of Germany, countries would be more precise. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland of West Germany (BRD) lives on in its present form, whereas the former DDR of East Germany has receded like so much collapsing scenery. Traces of the era that saw these two Germanies centre stage in a clash of civilisations, however, are still visible – on the streets, in the museums and in the minds of the people of the now unified Berlin – like tide marks on the social, political and very real landscape of the
