It takes a lot of imagination if you want to recreate the atmosphere of the first Checkpoint Bravo on the spot. Little remains of the Allied checkpoint. At least an idea. To speak of a slumber would be completely misplaced in the situation of Albrecht’s tar oven: on the eastern side – Drewitz – people were harassed and controlled. Here the old motorway connection and control building were finally dismantled. After 1969 – after the new Dreilinden crossing was put into operation – only members of the GDR border troops were able to move on the closed sections of the route until the Wall came down in 1989.
It was foreseeable what would happen after the sale of the historic site by the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks at an auction (45,000 euros) to a private investor in 2010. Because no apartments can be built here, it fell into disrepair. A real estate task of a special kind? Not quite.
As the Tagesspiegel was able to find out this week, in addition to a lot of rubbish, old car tires and trees growing out of the asphalt tracks, construction fences and overgrown paths, there are also traces of human life. A gas tank, a grill, a stainless steel pipe in the chimney and potted flowers signal: someone is here, someone is staying. Wherever checkpoint employees and truck drivers sat together in the service area before and after the Wall was built, someone is making themselves comfortable. After decades of vacancy, people now live in a building severely damaged by vandalism, sometimes behind inexpensive fibreboards that cover the remains of smashed window panes.
The building is a half-timbered building on a solid basement with a gabled roof. “It was designed by the architect Fritz from the building group of the state tax office,” says Wikipedia. “The final stage of expansion was designed by the architect Wolfgang Bürgel. After the checkpoint was closed, it was used as a campsite restaurant.” It has been empty since 2004.
The former service area – in the area of the former control systems on the west side of the autobahn – is probably the only facility from the early days of the division of Germany that has been preserved – albeit greatly reduced – and is linked to a border regime from before and in the first few years remembered after the Wall was built. Around 2,000 cars passed the checkpoint at the beginning of the holiday season.
The monument list in Berlin lists the system under the registration number 09065327 (Albrechts Teerofen 44-45). These vestiges were placed under protection: Autobahnbrücke (1939-40, reconstruction, 1950-54); Restaurant building (1951-1952), the plateau of the checkpoint and the motor vehicle ditch. The three Allied flagpoles that are still standing here are not specifically mentioned. They were recently almost tripped by a neighboring pine tree, which – now cut in half and left on the meter-high stump – only accentuates the desert of this site.
The cyclist pedaling along the wall path searches in vain for an explanation of what these three masts are all about. The erected steles mainly focus on the Wall, but little is known about the structure and functioning of the checkpoint, about what was happening at the time. One feels left alone with German-German history. Were there failed and successful escapes and risky “border crossings”? Anyone who wants to find out something about this should watch the NDR documentary “Transit DDR – When the border became more permeable”, a cinematic journey into the Cold War era. Because in it, Hartmut Richter tells how and why he fled to West Berlin in 1966 after jumping into the Teltow Canal via Albrecht’s tar oven. He had to stay in the water for a long time. The escape experience has shaped him to this day.
So why does it still look so uninspired here? Most recently, on November 9, 2019, this newspaper pointed out the deplorable conditions in Albrecht’s tar furnace, probably not without consequences. “In February 2020, the owner was written to and asked to secure the building and property. In the fall of 2020, the site was cleared and secured,” the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district office said: “The owner was asked to develop a suitable usage concept, which has not happened to date. An information board at the bridgehead of the former autobahn points to the importance of this historic site.” End of the official announcement. Has the State Monuments Office become active in the meantime?
The spokeswoman for Berlin’s state curator Christoph Rauhut is contrite: “Together with the lower monument protection authority, we will contact the owner again and check what steps need to be taken to secure the monument.” Of course, this historically significant site of the German- to preserve the substance of the division of Germany.
The owner of the Checkpoint Bravo is the real estate project developer Peja (Arnhem/Netherlands), who has bought together a strange-looking portfolio in its Germany business segment via auctions. In addition to Checkpoint Bravo, this includes the Elbbrücke Dömitz, a 986 meter long railway bridge over the Elbe, which was one of the longest river bridges in Germany, and the Vogelsang power plant, a coal-fired power plant built towards the end of the Second World War on the left bank of the Oder, about three kilometers north of the river center of Fürstenberg. The last surviving standard power plant from the Nazi era never went into operation. Uncertain future as an industrial monument?
Not really. Because according to the corporate philosophy of the project developer Peja (President and Managing Director: Toni Bienemann), the company strives “to involve everyone involved in order to create added value in every phase of the life cycle. Sustainability is not a dogmatic individual component. It’s in the DNA of our team and our approach to property development. Financial sustainability is always an integral aspect of our projects. Peja invests and preserves monuments for posterity, making them passable/accessible whenever possible.”
At the Vogelsang power plant, however, 100-meter chimneys soar into the sky like the orphaned flagpoles at Checkpoint Bravo: monuments that seem to refer to higher powers. exclamation mark of history.
The callback requested by Toni Bienemann was not long in coming. Yes, it’s true, he leased the former Dreilinden service area with the number Albrechts Teerofen 45 to a party. The man had previously lived in Albrecht’s tar oven. However, the investor cannot explain where another tenant comes from, who marks his property at number 44 of Albrechts Teerofen with his own mailbox and name tag. The over-sixties man with a gray ponytail absolutely doesn’t want to tell the Tagesspiegel how the monument will continue. Bad experiences with the media. “I won’t tell you, not even for money.” He has nothing to do with the Peja group, but he lives there and redesigns the rest area’s interior. A cement mixer is ready. The shell of the building will come soon. But he is not the owner. A motion detector and a surveillance camera are designed to deter intruders.
Bienemann says flags could be hung on the masts at Checkpoint Bravo. And he wants to “do a little, well, clean up.” Maybe there is also some color for the lane markings. Maybe.
