Peter Schneider

As long as I've lived in West Berlin, I have treated the structure that is considered a state border over there and a tourist attraction over here as simply an inconvenience. For the first time now, I decide to visit the Wall. I see a tour group climb out of a bus and then take the stairs to a lookout tower. Up top, a few of them put binoculars to their eyes and begin waving. What they see is a tour group on the other side of the Wall just climbing out of a bus run by the same travel agency. They wave back, and people in both groups now train their sights on the watchtower standing between them. What they see there, once they've focused their glasses, are glasses just being focused. Other travelers meanwhile have readied their cameras for shooting. Looking into their viewfinders, they follow the tour leader's finger as he points to an Eastern housefront. There a woman is cleaning windows, a little boy is playing on a balcony, and on another balcony an old man is taking his midday nap. The cameras click. When the woman notices she is being watched, she pauses and stares over from her side. Curious about what she can see from her window, I turn around. I see a man in a grey-green jacket holding a plastic bag in his hand. He wants to cross the street and is waiting until a red Opel has driven by. A woman is waiting on the other side of the street, but not for the man. She is holding a leash in her hand and watching a gray mongrel on the end of it, crouched on its hind legs and straining. Before the man reaches the other side of the street, he stops. I get the impression that he is looking toward the lookout tower from which I'm watching him. I turn back around and follow the tour leader's finger, pointing now at a barely noticeable, grayish-brown rise in the ground. This rise, which hardly deserves to be called a hill, lies in the middle of the prohibited zone and is inaccessible to residents on both sides of the Wall. The leader describes the spot in three foreign tongues, in each of which a German word recurs: Führerbunker. The travelers' whispered repetition of the word, the clicking of the camera shutters, the watchtowers all endow the hill with the power of a hallowed place. For a moment the image forms of an armed host to the left and right of their general's command post, sunk in sleep but still waiting for an order.