Berlin’s little green man

Berlin's little green man purposefully strides across the street.

It is raining. Not a hard rain, just an annoying rain, the sort of summer shower that forces you to take refuge in the nearest café, so I slip into Café Aedes, beneath a black-and-white striped awning while the rain taps on the canvas and an S-bahn—the former public transportation system for East Berliners—click-clacks on the raised platform over the boulevard.

The Café Aedes is in a quiet cobblestone arcade off the Savignyplatz in Charlottenburg. I wait out the rain sipping on a cappuccino. Berliners adore Italian food, and the Aedes’ roots are Italian—they list Classico Chianti as their house wine over Riesling—and one of the most popular Italian restaurants in the neighborhood.

But I digress. I am sitting out a summer storm and across the way is a little unnamed gift shop with a window full of off-beat souvenirs, particularly of former East Germany. They have various styles of toy Trabi’s, the polluting wonders of the former communist government, but what’s more interesting to me are the East German pedestrian signals with the little green man with a straw hat and purposeful stride—known as der Ampelmännchen.

A shop full of der Ampelmannchen.

You see, there are only a few ways you can tell for sure when you are in what used to be East Berlin. One is by spotting a yellow tram, which only ran in the East. But even easier (and more prevalent) is to look for the little green pedestrian Ampelmännchen when you want to cross the street. He is the most unique pedestrian crossing symbol in the world. Something about him seems firm, confident, and purposeful. Just as the GDR wished, decades ago, that its citizens would be. Before they were socialized into complacent meekness.

When the rain lets up I walk across the street to the little store and look at its Ampelmännchen hanging lights, and Ampelmännchen T-shirts, and Ampelmännchen coffee cups. And it makes me think that perhaps—perhaps—this little bold green man striding across the street in his straw hat is, in fact, the last surviving Berliner communist. Or, at the very least, the one who may outlive all the others. Perhaps he’s destined to be, forevermore, the last communist to cross the street.