My plane was delayed by two and a half hours. Needing only hand luggage for a five day stay I breezed past the baggage carousel at Berlin-Tegel, but the taxi ride added to the delay due to traffic jams on the AVUS highway. The taxi drove through the city streets instead, which allowed me to take in all that familiar Berlin architecture looking homely inviting in the unseasonably bright and warm sunshine. It had been gray and rainy all week, but now skies were clear blue, the taxi driver informed me.
Arriving so much later than expected I had only a few minutes in my childhood home before Mom and I had to get into her car and drive down south to Stahnsdorf to make our appointment. We were supposed to be there at 11am, and it was 11:45am already. Mom had called ahead to give notice of our delay, but she was worried, because under regular circumstances they don’t schedule these appointments past noon.
The Stahnsdorf grave site of F. W. Murnau, the director of silent movie classics like “Nosferatu” and “Sunrise”
Ruhestätte Stahnsdorf is a fifteen minute drive from our home, south of Berlin just a stone’s throw away on the “other” side of where the Wall used to be. When I was growing up, Zehlendorf and Wannsee were on “our” side, the “Western” side of the Wall, and just south were Teltow and Stahnsdorf, on the “Eastern” side. Unreachable. I knew of Teltow, because the avenue Teltower Damm, as its name indicated, went south past my school towards Teltow, but was thwarted from reaching the town by those infamous Cold War concrete barriers, with sand strip, barbed wire and heavily armed border patrols just behind.
The grave of illustrator Heinrich Zille
There was no Stahnsdorfer Straße I knew about, so the town of Stahnsdorf remained out of my consciousness for most of my childhood. Until the early 1980’s that is, when a bus route was extended to reach into those two city blocks within Stahnsdorf that somehow managed to have been incorporated into the Berlin city limits in the 1920’s, and thus wound up in the American District after the fall of the Third Reich, becoming part of West Berlin when Germany divided into two. These two narrow city blocks reached like an amoeba’s branchlike offshoot into DDR territory, surrounded on three sides by the Wall and at one point as narrow as a single street. The few inhabitants there felt cut off and neglected by the city. So in the 1980s, perhaps more for reasons of politics than infrastructure, it was decided to extend the busline that serviced Wannsee into that sliver of “free” Stahnsdorf. Which is how I learned the name of the town; when one of the buslines that passed our local stop announced their new “Endstation”: Stahnsdorf.
Endstation Stahnsdorf. Terminal Stahnsdorf.
“Graveyardsection for Internment under Trees”
