Berlin’s ghost stations

Taking the train to Hackensher Markt. Photo by David Lansing.

I am on a train with my friend Wilfred Seefeld, headed for Hackensher Markt, one of the first neighborhoods to get gentrified after The Wall came down in 1990. I tell Wilfred, who was born in what was once East Berlin and escaped with his parents when he was 7, the story about how I was supposed to meet a friend in Berlin back in the ‘70s but chickened out because I was afraid I’d miss the train stop and end up in East Germany.

Wilfred says that the train stop from the Zoo Station, where we started, to Fredrichstrasse used to go through the Wall and in to West Berlin but the GDR wouldn’t allow the West Berlin conductors to bring the train into the last station in East Berlin, so an East Berlin conductor would get on the train before the last stop (LehterStadt U-staion), take it into the East Berlin station, turn it around, and get off at the first stop.

“And this went on until 1990,” he says.

He also tells me that there were a number of underground stations along what is now Potzdamer Platz. “We used to call them ‘ghost stations’ because they were there—but they weren’t used. The trains wouldn’t stop.”

We both look out the window, thinking about this, and then Wilfred says, almost in a whisper, “Berlin is an interesting city. But it’s strange history also makes it very tiring.”