Paul Scraton explores the lives and stories that intersect at the end of the Chausseestraße…
Standing on Chausseestraße at just before nine on a Thursday morning, the first thing I notice is the absence of people.
They are there in their cars, in the buses and—rushing beneath my feet—in the U-Bahn trains, heading in and out from the city centre. They are there above me, behind the tinted windows of the Bayer-Schering (now Bayer HealthCare) pharmaceutical complex where scientists toil to create something as revolutionary as the contraceptive pill they developed in the 1960s.
But down here, on the uneven pavements, there is no one about and in the early morning sunshine I feel strangely alone.
This is often the way in those in-between places in a city, neither one neighbourhood or another. And I am not only standing on Chausseestraße but also on the Mauerweg, and if the Berlin Wall Trail is anything, it is an interface zone along its entire length, a collision of districts, of local neighbourhoods, of the city and the country.
But here I feel like I am standing in a very particular meeting point, where Mitte becomes Wedding and the old East becomes the old West—and where, during those years of division, a checkpoint for West Berliners to enter the eastern half of the city.
Open spaces, gradually being filled, hint at the location of the checkpoint buildings, but there are other interfaces here as well. Chausseestraße itself, having sneaked across the border, turns into the Müllerstraße, arguably the most “Wedding” of that district’s streets. After it passes the Bayer complex it crosses underneath the S-Bahn ring, the boundary of the city centre transport zone.
And where I am standing, the road—historically, when this was nothing but fields and the old city walls stood a few hundred metres to the south, this was the main postal route to Hamburg—crosses the Panke river, the shallow waters about to complete their 32-kilometre journey from Bernau just outside Berlin to here, where it passes beneath an ice rink and then empties into the Spandau Ship Canal. Once, it continued on to reach the Spree, but like so much of this corner of Berlin, the industrial revolution changed many things…even the course of a river.
So my interface zone is a strange place, one of pharmaceutical laboratories and sports fields, the ice rink where future Olympians complete their morning training rituals, and a “campsite” where, right on Chausseestraße but behind high walls, camper vans can park tightly together on the gravel in neat rows. There is no room, no green spaces, but there are electricity hook-ups for every pitch and the U-Bahn down the street will take you right into the city centre.
It seems strange to think of camping here, where the Wall once stood and where the industrial revolution transformed the city, bringing to Wedding and neighbouring Moabit the factories and the workshops, the