36 Field trip
Berlin, Bowie and the brilliant U-Bahn Divided for 30 years, it’s taken 20 more for Berlin’s subway system to bring the two sides of the German capital back together. Here, Wolfgang Diehl tells the story of the city’s metro, the U-Bahn, since the days of the Cold War
fter the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany in October the following year, Berlin faced a great number of challenges. One of biggest and most complex was reconnecting the public transport system between the former eastern and western parts that had been severed so abruptly by the construction of the Berlin Wall by the East German government in 1961. During the Cold War, the only connecting public transport station between East and West was at Friedrichstraße in the heart of the city which served as a checkpoint for travellers between the two parts. The East/West connection was served by the suburban railway, the S-Bahn, operated by the East German transport authority, the Reichsbahn, and therefore boycotted by a vast majority of West Berlin citizens. There was also U-Bahn
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line U6 running from AltMariendorf in the south underneath the East Berlin to the north terminating at Alt-Tegel. Apart from Friedrichstraße station, the other six stations on the U6 in East Berlin were closed off and trains passed slowly through the so-called Geisterbahnhöfe (ghost stations) that were additionally guarded by East German police, the ‘Vopos’ – short for Volkspolizisten. According to eyewitnesses, this made for some spooky journeys until one finally got used to the fact that sometimes, all of a sudden, communist police officers with rifles appeared out of the dark staring into the windows of the passing trains. Today, tourists would probably pay for such an experience. The U6 wasn’t the only one to suffer this bizarre fate. Metro line U8, from Wittenau in the north to (then) Leinestraße in Neukölln (coincidentally, an instrumental track on David
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