A Palace of Tears

“GDR passport stamp. TWO EURO!” yelled the stern woman in a bad military uniform. Nearby, two less stern men in equally bad uniforms stood with US and Soviet flags, vying for the attention (and money) of the camera-toting crowds. Behind them, a small hut: “US ARMY CHECKPOINT”. What fresh hell was this?

Welcome to Checkpoint Charlie, former Cold War flashpoint, now Disneyfied for masses. It’s just like Berlin 1961, but instead of facing off against Soviet tanks, one faces off against fridge magnets, postcards and impossibly tiny (and numerous) “official” pieces of the Berlin Wall encased in plastic. The iconic border hut, like much of Berlin, is a facsimile built for the tourists.

I’d had enough. Unlike escapees past, I fled into the old East, up Friedrichstraße to the eponymous station in search of a real Berlin experience. I spied a very 1960s piece of architecture: the Tränenpalast, or Palace of Tears.

Inside, I was transfixed by stories about Berlin, about the division and the building itself. The Tränenpalast served as a border crossing for Western visitors leaving the East and returning home. The tearful farewells of family and friends who could not follow loved ones westward gave the building its name.

Devoid of the tackiness and mindless nostalgia that cheapens many other Berlin museums, the Tränenpalast tells an honest and personal story of the divided city. It takes visitors on an absorbing tour from division to reunification, with the struggles of Berliners east and west laid bare: families divided; brutal border security; savage deaths at the Wall.

Border guards, often vilified as monsters, are humanised. Vintage footage of reunification shows them dismantling the fortified borders they once zealously protected, now facing uncertainty: “Tomorrow I do not have a job. What do I do now?”. Even today, the former east is financially worse off than the rest of Germany.

I left the Tränenpalast informed and moved. Outside, people crossed the former border without a second thought. I remembered Checkpoint Charlie. The misery inflicted by the East German state suddenly made the gaudy scene a couple of miles down the road more nauseating.

The bad actors stamping the insignia of a long-dead regime seemed as appropriate as dressing up as Hitler and driving around town in an open-top Mercedes. But that’s the magic paradox of Berlin. A city built on ghosts that can’t quite shake its past, but readily embraces the future.