BERLIN -- On the day the Berlin Wall came down, artist Kani Alavi was looking down from his third-story studio window just a block from Checkpoint Charlie, the border between East and West.
"For me, the people came like a wave, floating into freedom," said the man I met while walking the course of the former wall."It was a wonderful event," he said. "Three hundred thousand people came across. Walking, on bikes, in Trabants. Families were meeting and hugging. They went on a huge shopping spree, buying magazines, keyboards, music tapes.
"All I could say was, 'Welcome, welcome, welcome.' "
To many of us, it hardly seems possible that a decade has passed since the Berlin Wall opened on Nov. 9, 1989.
Nor does it seem long before that, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy told a cheering crowd "Ich bin ein Berliner." (He'd meant to say, "I am a Berliner" in a show of solidarity. What he actually said, by including "ein," was "I am a doughnut.")
But this year is indeed the 10th anniversary of the wall's demise. And 1999 also marks other major moments in German history.
It is the 50th anniversary of Germany as a republic. The 50th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Airlift, designed to thwart a postwar Soviet blockade of the city. And this year, the German government will move from Bonn to Berlin.
All of these events have helped transform Berlin into a city that is dramatically different than it was 10 years ago. Or five years ago. Or even last year. People here believe it is the fastest-changing city in Europe.
Anyone who hasn't been to Berlin in a few years wouldn't recognize it.
To get a sense of that change -- what Berlin had been like during the 28 years it was divided by the wall and what it is becoming -- I recently walked 24 miles through the city's heart, along the wall route.
That was just the section that went through the central city. The border once snaked 93 miles around West Berlin. Of that, about 65 miles were walled and 28 miles were set off by barbed wire.
Not everyone would want to take such an urban hike. It's tiring. Your feet get battered. And much of the route is no more than depressingly long stretches of weed-choked lots that once had been the wall's no-man's-land.
But it does highlight places, historical and modern, worth seeing.
Only seven sections of the wall still stand. One is along Bernauer Strasse, where the wall is preserved as a memorial. A graffiti-clad watchtower overlooks the Nordhafen canal. Another section is near the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, where you can still buy postcards with the famous sign that read: "You are now leaving the American sector." Another wall section is at the East Side Gallery on Muhlenstrasse, parallel to the Spree River, where in 1990, 110 artists from 21 countries painted wondrous murals.
The wall was the past. The Berlin of the present is changing faster than a Las Vegas showgirl.
Construction cranes lurk everywhere like preening birds stopped on their migration route.
Right now, Europe's biggest construction site is at Potsdamer Platz in the heart of the city. Before World War II, this was the busiest square in Europe. First battered by Allied bombs then hemmed in by the wall, the area became a wasteland, scraped to raw ugliness.
Skyscrapers have popped up like summer corn. Glass and steel office towers shoulder for room with the Grand Hyatt Hotel, apartment buildings, more than 100 stores in a snazzy shopping mall and Germany's first multiplex with an IMAX theater.
Not far away, near the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, built in 1894 as the seat of government for a united Germany and burned in 1933 under the Nazis, is being completely redone as the parliament building for the reunited Germany. Nearby, more hulking new government buildings are being rushed to readiness along the Spree River, which winds through the city.
Massive construction doesn't mark all the changes.
For years, the place to shop in Berlin was the Kurfurstendamm, the famous shopping street known as Ku'damm. It still is very popular. Every day but Sunday, people still stream into the stunning KaDeWe department store, the Harrods of Germany.
But if you're looking for what's hip and hot, visit the Mitte (MITT-uh). Formerly in the East, it has reclaimed its position as the "middle" or center of the city. In the midst of being gentrified, Mitte still has buildings pockmarked by bullets fired during World War II. But here you find Berlin's chi-chi art galleries, the see-and-be-seen-in restaurants and clubs, the cutting-edge artist hangouts.
Shoppers also swarm along Friedrichstrasse, which stretches north and south through the heart of the city, to buy everything from Mercedes Benzes to Donna Karan clothes, Gant to Gucci and the Foot Locker to T-shirts and burgers at Planet Hollywood.
Turn-of-the-last-century buildings are being converted into turn-of-the-big-deutschmark condos that sell for $300,000 and up. Dingy shops that once sold furnace coal now fizz up cappuccinos for $3 a cup.
My trek began in the north on Bernauer Strasse on a typically bleak November day. After a quick glance at a section of the wall at Mauer (Wall) Park, I walked along a weedy, trash-cluttered strip of empty lots between rows of apartment buildings.
The wall was not one barrier but parallel ones, each 13 feet high. In between them was a wide death strip lit by high-powered lights. It had a 9-to-12-foot-tall wire mesh fence running down the middle with sensors. Guard towers were strategically located. Soldiers patrolled with dogs. There were no land mines placed in the city, though they were put elsewhere along the East-West border.
The problem for escapees was not climbing over the wall, but making it across the death strip alive.
An estimated 5,000 people managed to escape. At least 160 were killed in the attempt. Another 260 were shot and wounded and 3,200 were arrested.
As I continued tracing the route, I walked northwest along Gartenstrasse, then southwest to the Spree River, passing through once middle-class neighborhoods now filled with Berlin's poor, particularly many Turkish immigrants.
By the river, I found one of Berlin's more bizarre sights. It was a grafitti-clad, gray cement watchtower, 40 feet tall and with a searchlight on top. Today it stands in the middle of a new children's playground, flanked by an ultra-modern apartment building colored strawberry and salmon.
South of here, paralleling the Spree, new government buildings now block the wall's old route. Men in hard hats halted all traffic as they rushed their work to completion.
Passing through the muddy construction sites, I walked just east of where the Reichstag is being rebuilt, complete with a new glass dome, and toward the famous Brandenburg Gate, built in 1789.
I walked down Auguststrasse, checking out the side streets. When I was in Berlin nine years ago and then again eight years ago, grass and weeds grew out of the tops of some of these war-battered buildings.
Now they're taking on the look of historic charm.
Back on the wall route at the Brandenburg Gate, I strolled along Unter den Linden, named for the long string of linden trees planted down the center. It was once one of Europe's grandest boulevards.
When the area was in the East, it was a stark picture sketched in the grays of a No. 2 pencil. Sullen gray office structures, sullen gray museums, sullen gray people. It stood in sharp contrast to the technicolor West with its neon, brightly lit shops and gaily dressed people.
Now the grays are fast disappearing. The Eldon Hotel, on Unter den Linden a couple of blocks from the Brandenburg Gate, has been polished to a new patina and now is considered Berlin's finest. Turn south onto Friedrichstrasse and there are the new-car dealerships, stores selling fancy chocolates and boutiques with the lastest fashions.
Farther down Unter den Linden, I passed the State Opera House and came to the Spree River and Museum Island, aptly named for its collection of museums. The island was the original site of the city when it began as a tiny, 13th-century trading post.
The museums are the Altes Museum, Neues Museum, Alte National Galerie, Bodemuseum and the Pergamon Museum. Except for the Altes and Pergamon, the museums are closed for rehabilitation until 2001.
When I go to Berlin, I never fail to visit the Pergamon. It has an astounding collection of Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Islamic and Middle Eastern art and architecture. Most stunning of all is the Pergamon Altar from a Greek temple that was built in 165 B.C. in what is now Turkey.
The Altes art museum has some treasures from the national gallery on display during the renovation.
Continuing east, Unter den Linden changes its name to Karl Liebknecht and soon I arrived at Alexanderplatz. This is a truly ugly example of East German architecture, raw and soulless. The distinctive 1,200-foot TV Tower, a broadcasting tower, by its height alone has become a landmark. But it's surrounded by tacky shops and a treeless desert of cement. It is, however, a transportation hub for subway trains and buses.
On Nov. 4, 1989, 700,000 people crowded onto Alexanderplatz in one of the largest demonstrations in German history. They came to protest the communist German Democratic Republic, loudly but peacefully.
Five days later, the wall fell.
After I returned to the wall route again near the Brandenburg Gate, I passed the new U.S. Embassy being built just south of the gate, across from Tiergarten Park, a large park with gardens, walkways and a zoo. No tree in Tiergarten Park is older than 55. In the fierce winters after World War II, impoverished Berliners chopped down every tree for firewood.
Soon I reached Potsdamer Platz, Berlin's Oz. Potsdamer Platz is bigger than ever. Its new stores and theaters are drawing 100,000 people every day. Germans come even on Sundays when most of the stores are closed. They love to window shop.
Farther on, I stopped at the Checkpoint Charlie Musuem on Friedrichstrasse.
It's a private museum that's more tacky than slick, but you can see some of the wonderfully inventive ways people used trying to escape from the East.
"Germans have trouble dealing with their history," Alavi said after describing the joy of those who came through Checkpoint Charlie 10 years ago.
"The wall shows a brutal part of our history, a part that should not be repeated. But most Germans just want it to be forgotten."