March, 2019
Berlin -- Today, going out for breakfast Brötchen at the nearest Bäckerei, I crossed the Berlin Wall, or what is left of it. Its former location is marked by a line of street-level paving stones. Coming back from the corner of Aadelbert and Melchior, in old East Berlin, I walked along the former death-strip at Bethaniendamm, which is now a park, joining an old man walking his dog and a new mother with her baby carriage.
All walls should come to such ends.
Tearing down walls in Washington got a review in today's Washington Post. Curator Molly Ruppert offered a wall to smash at the Otis Street Arts Project. Of all the walls in the show, I most like the one where barbed wire rolls are drawn on flimsy curtains.
Across Bethaniendamm at Aadelbert is a wonderfully mussy old petting zoo with two ponies, several goats, a sheep, and chickens. There is even a Misthaufen, a good symbol for where wall-mentality should wind up.
