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It’s impossible to make out the tourists from the locals on a sunny Sunday afternoon at Mauerpark––the 37-acre linear green space formerly part of the Berlin Wall. The weekly Flohmarkt (flea market) is underway, surrounded by food stalls, picnics, live music and basketball games. Graffiti artists add a fresh design to a nearby portion of the wall left standing in the name of history.
Cyclists and pedestrians alike turn off Berlin’s well-known thoroughfare Danziger Street onto the cobblestone path that runs through Mauerpark. A waymarker, posted like a street sign, reads “Berliner Mauerweg,” meaning “Berlin Wall Trail.”
I’ve run along the Mauerweg countless times, usually heading north through Mauerpark, along the Kirschblütenpfad (Cherry Blossom Path) that runs underneath the Böse Bridge, and crossing the Panke River into the Berlin-Schönholz neighborhood before doubling back. But I never thought of the stories embedded into this path. The joyous cacophony of barbecuers and crowds enjoying Sunday karaoke in the mini-colosseum-style seating in Mauerpark supplants the grisly images of the Berlin Wall typically reserved for memorials and documentaries.
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Most pedestrians and cyclists on the Mauerweg probably have some understanding that they’re walking across the scars of the infamous Berlin Wall, a heavily fortified military barrier that turned West Berlin into a political island for 28 years. What they probably don’t know is that the trail continues for the entirety of the wall’s 100-mile perimeter around what was formerly West Berlin. I certainly didn’t know until Sascha Möllering, a Berlin on Bike tour guide, took me on a ride nearly a decade ago while I was working on a story about the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The fall of the Berlin Wall
Möllering was 15 years old, living in the leafy West Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde, when an East German bureaucrat by the name of Günter Schabowski mistakenly announced that travel restrictions to the west would be lifted immediately. It was November 9, 1989, not quite a year since Erich Honecker, general secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, confidently declared that, “The wall will still be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed.”
As the wall met its sudden political demise, Möllering was sitting at home on the couch with his mother watching everything unfold: the surprising news conference, the first East Germans crossing the border, crowds of West Berliners climbing atop the wall at the Brandenburg Gate.
“At one point she looks at me and says, ‘What’re you still doing here?’” he remembers. “She gives me a 20 and says, ‘Go! Go take a look. You’re going to regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t witness this.’”
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So he called up his friend and they grabbed a bus to join the euphoria at the Brandenburg Gate where U.S. President Ronald Reagan gave his famous “tear down this wall” speech just two years earlier. Möllering estimates that a couple of thousand people were already there when they arrived, singing Beatles songs and dancing on top of the Berlin Wall. He vividly remembers people jumping down to the East and helping to pull them back up as East German border guards rushed over. He describes the dejected look on the guards’ faces.
“None of [the East German guards] wanted to be there,” he says. “They all knew this”—their presence and the Berlin Wall—“was for nothing.”
The next day, Berliners took it upon themselves to begin the work of physically tearing down the wall. Photos of men and women taking a chisel to the wall and hammering away quickly spread around the world. Nobody made a decision to do it. Nobody organized anything, says Möllering.
“It just happened like an absolute whirlwind,” he says. “And I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Turning the wall into a trail
Efforts to turn the Berlin Wall into a trail had actually already gotten underway a few months before the dismantling. Michael Cramer, then a Green Party member of Berlin’s Abgeordnetenhaus (House of Representatives), cycled 100 miles in the summer of 1989 along a makeshift trail created by the Western Allies that traced the Berlin Wall.
“I never could imagine that some months later, the wall would be open,” the 75-year-old retired politician tells me on a sunny afternoon with his bike leaning against a remnant of the wall-turned-memorial at Bernauer Street.
The next year, he cycled around the Berlin Wall again––this time along the 100- to 300-foot-wide former “death strip” between the two main barriers of the wall. This is where East Germans trying to escape faced barbed-wire fences, watchtowers with armed guards, alarm systems, trip wires and, in some cases, a particularly medieval contraption nicknamed “Stalin’s Lawn,” consisting of foot-long metal spikes often arranged in clusters or rows in the ground along the edge of the wall.
Cramer quickly became a fierce advocate to preserve as much of the wall as possible and to create a bicycle-friendly trail along its old perimeter. But, as he recalls, the prevailing sentiment of local newspapers and politicians at the time was to remove all traces of the Berlin Wall. Ten years later, Cramer pushed for and got unanimous support in the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus to build the Mauerweg.
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For Cramer, now known as the “Father of the Berlin Wall Trail,” it was important to preserve and memorialize this quintessential piece of Berlin history. After World War II, Willy Brandt, a former West Berlin mayor who went on to become Germany’s chancellor, supported memorializing the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which suffered extensive damage during an Allied bombing raid on November 23, 1943. The main tower, which was 370 feet tall, was partially destroyed and became a symbol of the war’s devastation in Berlin. Cramer quotes Brandt, saying, “Let us save some parts of the monster like we did with the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.”
Had it been up to Cramer, the country would’ve saved even more of the Berlin Wall. At one point, the wall featured more than 300 watchtowers; today, only five remain. One of them stands at the Berlin Wall Memorial, an outdoor space with preserved remnants of the wall, documentation of the wall’s history and photos of the victims, where Cramer meets me at the corner of Bernauer Street and Acker Street.
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Physical remains of the wall are few and far between outside of the city center. You can find long stretches of the wall at the Berlin Wall Memorial and at the East Side Gallery along the Spree River, where murals (like one depicting the famous kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker) cover each and every panel. As you continue outside of the city center, physical reminders of the wall drift away as the path alternates between paved asphalt and crushed limestone. Only the trail markers for the Berliner Mauerweg and the occasional informational sign remind you of where you’re running or cycling.
The Berlin Wall Documentation Center opened on August 13, 1998––exactly 37 years to the day that construction on the wall began. A few years later, on August 11, 2001, two days shy of the 40th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s construction, 250 cyclists rode along the new path. The trail was then officially opened on October 4, 2001, when Cramer rode on a tandem bike with a colleague, Berlin Senator Peter Strieder, in the Kreuzberg neighborhood where the first Berliner Mauerweg trail markers were unveiled.
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Running, cycling and kayaking the Mauerweg today
For me, the true beauty of the Mauerweg lies on the edges of the city where the trail cuts through the forested suburbs, along lakes and over boardwalks elevated above the marsh. I recently made a point to revisit the path as a runner, cyclist and kayaker. First, my wife, Melanie, and I ran along our usual Mauerweg route—starting in Mauerpark. Except instead of doubling back as we usually do about three miles out somewhere in Pankow near Volkspark Schönholzer Heide, an 86-acre state park in Berlin, we continued north along the trail for another 7.5 miles to personally uncharted territory. This section felt surprisingly remote. The aerial view on Google Maps had me expecting a relatively urban path, when, in fact, the Mauerweg functions as a green belt with lush vegetation surrounding the path for much of this northeastern stretch.
The untrained eye would never suspect that this was once the site of one of the most dangerous borders in the history of humankind. But I occasionally sensed the formerly barren no man’s land, especially in Blankenfelde where trail users pass a field of flat, ankle-high grass. Using the Berlin Wall app, I followed along with an interactive map that tells the stories of those who tried to escape and the locations where they made their attempts. I counted 15 Berliners who were killed at various points of the 12-mile route we ran on a sunny September morning.
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The stories of these victims are tragic. After making it over the first wall, across no man’s land, and with his ladder leaning up against the final barrier, 20-year-old Michael Schmidt was shot with one arm on top of the wall near the Wollank rail station on December 1, 1984. Dorit Schmiel, also 20, tried to escape in the exact spot where one of her cousins successfully fled. Her fiancé and three friends joined her and made it through the barbed wire only to be arrested, but Schmiel was shot in the stomach. Thirty years later, her friends were able to participate in the trial against the three border guards who were responsible for her death––a small solace, I’m sure, especially considering many border guards who killed fellow Berliners were often decorated and promoted for their acts at the time. West Berliner Hermann Döbler wasn’t even trying to flee when he was shot dead on June 15, 1965. The story goes that two border soldiers noticed Döbler heading down the Teltow Canal, a waterway that separated East and West and served as an escape route for some, in a motorboat with his companion, Elke Märtens. Little did he know that he had crossed the invisible border cutting through the water and into East Berlin. Döbler even gave a polite wave to the guards, which they took as a provocation and opened fire. A memorial for Döbler, with his photo and story, stands on the shoreline near where he was shot on the Teltow Canal.
Fortunately, not all of the stories along the Mauerweg are tragic. A few weeks later, Melanie and I took the train out to Wannsee to paddle around Düppeler Forest, an island sitting on the edge of a lake. After passing underneath Glienicke Bridge, the so-called Bridge of Spies, we worked our way down the Teltow Canal.
Hubert Hohlbein practiced diving and swimming in freezing water to prepare for his escape attempt across Jungfernsee, a lake that connects to other surrounding bodies of water, like the Teltow Canal and Wannsee. After two of his friends succeeded, Hohlbein made it across himself on November 21, 1963. He went on to join a group helping refugees cross the border. In October 1964, he helped 57 East German citizens, including his mother, escape through a tunnel built by students underneath a bakery at 97 Bernauer Street.
To end my adventure along the Mauerweg, I pulled my BMC Switzerland bike out of the basement and retraced the ride I took with Möllering nearly a decade earlier. I rode through the city and hopped on the trail at its southern edge in Buckow. After cutting through some woods on a narrow dirt path, one of the rare sections of the Mauerweg that still isn’t paved, I pedaled by single-family homes along the appropriately named Grenz (Border) Street. From there, I jumped onto paved paths that pulled me out of the city and into the countryside, with its rustic scent of manure. But it didn’t take long for the city to return as I turned back north along the Teltow Canal (this time, on the eastern side of the city) and the Mauerweg morphed into a bike highway that parallels the Autobahn. It’s near here, at a memorial for Chris Gueffroy, the last person shot and killed while trying to escape East Berlin, where I met Jonny Whitlam, a British tour guide and expert on Berlin’s history.
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Whitlam explains that 20-year-old Gueffroy, who died roughly nine months before the wall fell, was convinced to go for it after rumors that East Germany’s shoot-to-kill orders had been rescinded. Gueffroy and his friend waited until Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson visited East Berlin, convinced that the border guards wouldn’t shoot someone during such a high-profile event, potentially embarrassing the country on the international stage. So they jumped onto the death strip, which is now the smooth, asphalted bike path Whitlam and I were standing on.
“His friend gets over, but Chris Gueffroy is shot from both sides by several border guards,” Whitlam explains. “One of the bullets hits him in the heart, and he dies.”
The future of the Berlin Wall Trail
Möllering estimates he’s ridden thousands of miles along the Mauerweg, having done at least 300 tours over the years, not to mention five century rides. Ambitious ultramarathoners can also sign up (individually or as part of a relay team) for the annual 100-mile Berlin Wall Race. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a street bowling group began a project of bowling their way around the entire route.
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The city continues to make improvements to the Mauerweg. Last year, a more than half-mile stretch of the Mauerweg in the southeastern Treptow-Köpenick area reopened with four new informational markers and an improved waymarking system. In July, a two-year construction project was completed that closed a gap in the Mauerweg, with Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s national rail operator, building a tunnel underneath the rail lines in the municipality of Blankenfelde-Mahlow. Meanwhile, a couple months ago, construction began on renovations to the nearly three-quarter-mile-long “Green Belt at Buschgraben” in the suburbs of Zehlendorf and Kleinmachnow.
The fall of the Berlin Wall just 35 years ago can feel like recent history. Before that fateful day of November 9, 1989, I’m sure East and West Berliners could not have imagined that people would one day regularly enjoy running along the scars of the wall. But the Mauerweg is here. It exists.
If rails can become trails, why not borders, too? Berlin certainly shows it’s possible, and that makes the idea of a similar path along the U.S. and Mexican border, through the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or even between Israel and Palestine seem a little less crazy than it might look on paper.
“I love this wall trail,” says Möllering, after reflecting on how far the city has come since Günter Schabowski’s press conference changed everything. “I love the fact that this is a tangible way to experience history and spend time outside in beautiful Berlin.”
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