I first visited West Germany as a student, during the height of the Cold War, but I didn’t make it to Berlin until shortly after the Wall came down. In fact, when I arrived there by night train from Munich in the spring of 1990, it was still coming down, both figuratively and literally. Chugging through what until very recently had been East Germany, we stopped at a station where the train remained closed—like Lenin’s on his 1917 journey to Saint Petersburg—while an elderly woman in a shabby, ill-fitting uniform made her way slowly along the platform, meticulously copying down the numbers of our passenger cars, obviously performing a decades-long but now pointless ritual. In the morning, we pulled into the Berlin Zoo station, where everyone got out except for yours truly, because I was too naïve to know that Berlin Zoo was, in fact, the main station for West Berlin and that the final stop, the Hauptbahnhof, where I ended up disembarking, was a cavernous, empty old pile of rubble—or close to it—in the former East Berlin.
