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East Berlin
It's just a white shed and a stack of sandbags filled with concrete, a replica of
Checkpoint Charlie. Visitors to this traffic island on Friedrichstrasse pose from
two directions—west and east—because they're standing on the old symbolic border
of the two Berlins.
Checkpoint Charlie was for diplomats, Allied military, and foreign tourists who
wanted to get into East Berlin—and that's the source of its mystique. Today's Cold
War buffs have to be content with photos by the 1960s-era replica shed, a browse
through the private collections of the nearby Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, and maybe
a visit to the Allied Museum in Berlin's Zehlendorf district, where the original
Checkpoint Charlie building is on display.
The huge portrait photographs over Checkpoint Charlie of two soldiers—one American,
one Soviet—symbolize the Big Brother military presence of Cold War Berlin. One little-known
fact: the young Soviet guard isn't Soviet at all! He's wearing the uniform of the
Russian Federation…the photo was taken in 1994, three years after the fall of the
Soviet Union.
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