Berlin Breaks Another Wall

Many Worlds Meet in the Humble Currywurst Served in the German Capital.

- Shreya Sen-Handley

Grand old Berlin, Germany’s most magnificent city, may have been left reeling from two World War defeats but its spirit remained unbroken. For years afterwards, its inhabitants struggled to free themselves from totalitarian rule by escaping over The Wall, until that came tumbling down and with it the regime that held Berlin in thrall. And with that new dawn came new freedoms, a new ethos and a new and exciting cultural flowering. This is particularly evident as my husband and I walk along the mile of avant garde art and paeans to liberation that is the East Side Gallery, the most colourful and stirring section of what remains of the Berlin Wall. This stretch of the infamous wall that once tore a people apart hasn’t just been saved as a reminder of the horror of division, it’s been transformed into the funkiest artistic tribute to human resilience and love for our fellow man. If that love is captured beautifully in the mural of Russia’s Leonid Brezhnev passionately kissing East Germany’s Erich Honecker in a pastiche condemning wars, and in the sunny yellow-and-white affirmation that god is not only a woman but one of colour, then it is also to be found in the kiosks clustered on either end of this span of the wall.

These stalls peddling everything from pieces of the wall to global grub (American apple pie and “Indische” mango ice cream) reinforce the message of this gallery. International amity they seem to say, not war, is the need of the hour. And nothing does that better than the largest, most thronged shack of all at one end of this iconic wall, a stone’s throw from the commanding Oberbaum Bridge—a curry wurst stall.