The East Side Gallery is a special place, where art has become the expression for a unique point in time of the history of a separated Germany. It is a meeting point that talks about an old Berlin and a new Berlin, a separated and a unified Germany. – from the East-Side Gallery web site

Walking to and from my hotel near the Oberbaumbrücke, a hotel that just happened to be floating in the river Spree, I had to pass through a doorway that was cut through the last remaining section of the old Berlin Wall. This last section of the wall is called The East-Side Gallery and it is covered in paintings done by artists from all over the world. This last surviving part of the Berlin wall is visited by tourbus after tourbus of tourists from all over the world and stands as a reminder of the ugly history and deeds we, as a global society, don’t ever want to repeat.

As I left the boat that first morning, I walked along the wall and I looked at the paintings. They were almost all political. Some were bold statements, others left their meaning up to the viewer’s imagination. It was a crisp, clear, and very cold morning as I clipped down the street at a pace that was meant more to keep me warm than to stop me from getting a good view of the art. I snapped photographs as I went, my exposed fingers freezing as my index finger clicked the shutter.

During the week I went on my way to explore the streets of Berlin. Day after day I passed through the wall. THE Wall. The one that I remember being built. The wall that was meant to keep people in, or out, no one really knew, they only knew that it was to keep them separated. East from West. Communist from Capitalist. THE Wall that separated mothers from daughters, sisters from brothers, fathers from sons, aunts and uncles and grandparents from the younger generation who now could not care for them in their old age. THE Wall where people were killed for attempting to cross over it. There was no one living in Berlin had not been affected by this wall that appeared seemingly out of nowhere in 1961.

But in order to start and end my day, I had to pass through the doorway that was cut out of this very same wall. I slept in old West Berlin and started my day in old East Berlin and I ended my day coming from The East through the wall to The West. Yes, the old East and the old West, because Berlin is now just Berlin.

Or is it?

Doing this day after day, this crossing though the wall thing, I began to imagine the impossibility of, the craziness of, the divisiveness of, this wall. I would touch the West side of the wall and then I would touch the East side of the wall. West was West and East was East and never shall they meet. I tried to wrap my mind around the limitations the wall represented – the limitations of movement, of thought, of communication, of living.

I became intensely aware of my crossing this divide and how much of the divided East and West culture still exist in Berlin. Communism may have fallen, dead as a doornail, and Capitalism my be an ideal dream of sorts to some although not all, but East and West still live in the psyche that make up the collective inhabitants of Berlin. The divide does not exist in where or how they get somewhere. Everyone can now take either the S-Bahn or the U-Bahn freely. The divide does not exist in language. The first language of all Berliners is the same although more often than not their second languages are different. The people who grew up in The East learned Russian and the people who grew up in The West learned English. But it goes deeper than that, into their character, into the character of the city. The intuitive awareness of the still existing East/West divide is so deep it is almost unexplainable.

This divide could be symbolized in the reconstruction of the city. An attempt to make it whole, to cover the circle of scar tissue around Berlin, a scar that looks like some appendectomy gone bad. West Berlin came out of the fall of the Berlin wall fairly well, unscathed physically, but the former East Berlin has been going under fifteen years of reconstruction and renovation that seems like it will never end. And to allow another bad metaphor, it also seems to be a little like Shakespeare’s character Lady Macbeth. It may never be rid of that damn spot. The constant washing and scrubbing and rebuilding may go on forever.

As I walked around Oranienburgerstrasse looking for galleries and arty type things, I realized that there was no shortage of yummy restaurants to eat in. Felafal, Thai, Indian, Italian, beer – all were available in spades and there for the taking. I decided on pizza and walked into the Trattoria Peretti, surveying all of the empty tables. This restaurant has been packed with people everytime I had walked by it, but I was late for lunch and everyone else had already come and gone.

As I stood in the middle of the restaurant the waitress came out and greeted me in German, which I didn’t hear. She quickly switched to English when she suspected that I didn’t understand her. ‘Have a seat!’ she said. ‘I will!’, I replied. She heard my accent and asked me if I was American. When I replied ‘yes’, she said ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’. I laughed, knowing exactly what she meant.

I grabbed some magazines as I headed to sit down in a corner table inside, out from underneath and away from the intensely bright blue sky shining down onto the terasse. Reading the menu I settled on a simple pizza with cheese, mushrooms, and basil.

My waitress got off of her feet and sat with me while we waited for the pizza to finish in the oven. We talked about everything – from East/West German politics, American politics, our last failed election, growing up in West Berlin (the better part!) and living in the old East Berlin, the ever changing neighborhood we were sitting in (Orienburger Tor/Mitte), the enormous amount of construction in the city (does Berlin really need all of those empty buildings?), and why does everyone want to leave Berlin and Germany?

My pizza finally arrived. I say finally because it was due to our talking that it took so long. I ate slowly and relaxed in the restaurant before heading back out to the galleries, thinking about all that we had talked about.

As I started talking to more people during my stay in Berlin, I got a very different picture of the place each time a conversation ended. Everything depended on where the person grew up and what their unique perspective was. It also began to make Berlin kind of undefinable, a testament to its ever changing and expanding nature.