Gleimtunnel: The Underpass That Was Walled Shut
Why is it significant?
Walk into the dim, echoing underpass where Gleimstraße dives beneath the railway embankment. Rows of old iron columns hold up the tracks overhead, the light falls in pale stripes, and every sound comes back to you twice.
Key Facts
| Place | Gleimtunnel: The Underpass That Was Walled Shut |
|---|---|
| Address | Gleimstraße, 10437 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.54650, 13.40030 |
| Part of Walk | The Wall on Bernauer Straße: Escapes, Tunnels and the Mauerpark in Berlin |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the dim, echoing underpass where Gleimstraße dives beneath the railway embankment. Rows of old iron columns hold up the tracks overhead, the light falls in pale stripes, and every sound comes back to you twice. This is the Gleimtunnel, built around the beginning of the twentieth century to let the street pass under the railway lines.
For decades it was a perfectly ordinary connection between two working-class districts: Prenzlauer Berg on one side, Wedding on the other. Carts and bicycles rattled through, workers walked to factories, children ran through to play on the other side. Nobody thought of it as a border, because there was nothing to divide.
In 1961 the line between the Soviet and French sectors ran right here, and the tunnel lay on the western side. The East sealed its end with a wall. For twenty-eight years, the street that had joined two neighbourhoods ended in a blank barrier, and the dark vault behind it became a dead end, a quiet tunnel leading nowhere. People on each side lived a few hundred steps from each other and might as well have lived on different continents.
After the Wall fell the barrier was removed, and the tunnel became a passage again. Today cyclists whistle through it, and people from Wedding walk across to the Sunday flea market without a second thought. Just beyond, a footbridge called the Schwedter Steg carries walkers high over the railway tracks that once marked the border.
And that is where our walk along the Wall ends. You began on a tower looking down on a preserved death strip, and you heard about windows bricked up, a church blown to dust, a tunnel dug by students, and lives lost for a few metres of sand. You end in a tunnel that simply lets people through, which is all it was ever meant to do. Take a last look back along the vault, then step out into the light on whichever side of old Berlin you like.