Border shenanigans at Steinstücken

[lethargic_man]

My bike ride on 9 March took me to a place called Steinstücken, which is a settlement of only a few streets:

Property transactions in the eighteenth century followed by the incorporation of surrounding areas into Berlin resulted in this becoming an exclave of Berlin surrounded entirely by Brandenburg. When the city was divided after the War and at the start of the Cold War, Steinstücken was left cut off, with the inhabitants having to pass through two checkpoints to get into the rest of Berlin.

Map from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons licence

(The roads crossing the state line today obviously did not exist during the divided Berlin territory. Where I took my photo above from, where Bernhard-Beyer-Straße meets Steinstraße on the map above, was at the time the route of a mini-Berlin Wall, complete with a killing field outside it.)

Eventually, in 1972, a deal was done in which a corridor of West Berlin territory was created to connect it to the rest of Berlin, in exchange for West Germany ceding six uninhabited other exclaves to East Germany, and paying four million marks.

This is the approach road that this deal resulted in becoming usable. The road itself is in Berlin (what was West Berlin), but everything immediately to both the right and the left is Brandenburg (what was East Germany).

(There's no signs indicating this on the road itself, which I found a little disappointing, though there is a sign in Steinstücken.)

At the southern end of the road, the geography gets even more fractal, as the road is in Berlin, the railway line to the right in Brandenburg, and then the area to the right of the railway line Berlin again.

This sign amused me:

No, there was not a T-junction in the Berlin Wall here, but the Berlin Wall Trail has a three-way split: the original route ignored the shenanigans around Albrecht's Tar Kiln and left the route of the wall for a spell, but there's a new route under construction following it more accurately. Here's where the old route and the new route converge.