Larry, I’m certainly old enough to remember visiting both East and West Berlin in 1967 whilst a student in Europe. On the western side, you could walk right up to the Berlin wall, which was where the actual border was, and spit on it if you liked. On the western side there were frequent little monuments consisting of crosses and flowers, honouring East Germans shot by their border guards as they tried to cross that segment of the wall into the West. On the eastern side, you couldn’t get anywhere near the actual border. There were one or two other barriers of barbed wire and assorted obstacles, with presumably mined clear spaces in between, to keep East Germans far from the actual border itself. Strangely, I never came across a single monument on the eastern side to West Germans shot in the back by West German border guards as they tried to escape from the wicked West into the Soviet-maintained workers’ paradise of East Germany. Visiting the Brandenburg Gate was an especially moving experience for me. This impressive monument from the late 1700s ended up just inside post-war East Berlin. One could get almost up to it from the West, and then be stopped by a barrier of barbed wire which prevented passage but didn’t block the view. From there you could see East Germans and other East European tourists standing behind the Gate on their side, looking west. Later, when I entered East Berlin through the famous Checkpoint Charlie, I took a tour which went to the spot behind the Gate where the easterners were gathered, looking westwards through the Gate. The view was broadly similar from either side. But one might as well have been standing in a different universe. On one side were free people; on the other, mostly captives of Communism who, if they tried to take those few steps westward through the Gate, would be shot in the back, and have a little cross and a little flower arrangement set up for them in the west.