The Extremely Short Wall of Berlin

[lethargic_man]

You've heard of the Great Wall of China? Well, here's the Extremely Short Wall of Berlin.

(All right, I've made that joke before, but this is a more extreme example.)

Actually what's interesting here is that the final iteration of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1970, immediately identifiable by the pipe on top making it difficult for anyone climbing over to get a handgrip on the top, took a shortcut here, cutting off about a hundred square metres of marshland at the top of the Groß Glienicke lake; as a result the corresponding section of original 1961/2 Berlin Wall wasn't demolished, leading it it being one of the few remaining pieces existing today. You can see it in the background, behind a metal fence which was another part of the border fencing, and which dates to the late sixties. It was originally topped with Y-shaped wire deflectors.

(Sorry there's no better picture of the 1961/2 wall; this was a long ride and I was in a hurry to get back to work, and shot photos rapidly and only fully read the infoboard afterwards.)

The house in the background is actually only half a house. The wall went through the middle, and the half in the East German border area got demolished.

Unrelated linguistic/historical note: There are multiple places around Berlin with the name Glienicke; I looked it up, and it comes from a Slavic word meaning "lime". The Germans fled west, from invading peoples like the Huns and Alans, from this area into the Roman Empire in the fourth or so century, and the Slavs subsequently occupied it. During the Middle Ages the River Elbe, which flows diagonally across Germany into the North Sea, was the limit of German settlement, and to this day placenames to the east of that river tend to reflect a Slavic origin, rather than a German.