![]() For the most part, though, it is made of materials originally intended for housing construction-a circumstance that contributes to its generally implausible appearance. For a few blocks, it incorporates a red brick wall bounding one side of a cemetery, and for more than a mile the Spree serves as the wall. Along several streets, it is a row of vacant apartment houses whose doors and windows have been bricked shut. In outlying sections of the city, it consists mainly of two ten-foot-high barbed-wire fences spaced about six feet apart. ![]() It is anything but uniform in construction. It runs along the sector border-the line that was drawn approximately through the center of Greater Berlin in 1945 by the Four Powers to mark off the Soviet and Allied occupation areas-and since the sector border, which follows some of Berlin’s old borough borders, is even more eccentric than most territorial boundaries, the wall runs a highly irregular course, going for a certain distance in one direction, veering off in another, curving slightly here, making a ninety-degree turn there, cutting through parks, squares, cemeteries, factory lots, and waterways, and continuing thus on its ragged way. Die Mauer is only twenty-seven miles over all. The Great Wall stretched for fifteen hundred miles, Hadrian’s for almost seventy-five. It isn’t even very long, as famous Walls go. Unlike the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and other walls that have figured in history, it is an engineering and architectural laughingstock. ![]() Physically, too, it is in a class by itself. Countries have built walls to keep their enemies out die Mauer is probably the only wall ever built to keep a people in. But there has been never been anything quite like die Mauer-or, as Mayor Willy Brandt has called it, die Schandmauer (the wall of shame). Other things in the city are easy enough to imagine, because they can be Iikened to something familiar-the Kurfürstendamm to Fifth Avenue, Potsdamer Platz (in an earlier period) to Times Square, the Spree River to the East River, and so on. The wall that divides Berlin is hard to visualize, because it defies comparison.
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