At Checkpoint Charlie things are festive. It’s almost exactly 50 years since the Soviets and the East Germans suddenly put up the Berlin Wall and all of Berlin is marking that event in different ways. Around Checkpoint Charlie, the most visible crossover point between east and west Berlin, there are images and texts about the history of the wall. There are lists of escapes from the East, the failed ones and successful ones, diagrams showing the different techniques including tunnels and false bottoms to car boots. Also displayed are aerial photographs from the 1960s where the place looks like a huge, complicated toll booth, with barriers and warnings and impassive-looking guards wearing the classic Soviet army helmet. As the text in the nearby Wall Museum reminds us, this is where the Soviet empire began and stretched all the way across Eurasia to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast (actually it began a bit further west, away from the urban island of West Berlin, and this was actually the last limit of the American empire, but never mind details). Whichever way you look at it, this was the fulcrum of the scale of fear, the whole tarazu between ‘oppression’ and ‘freedom’, with each side claiming the freedom and democracy bit for themselves.

Standing there, I’m suddenly transported from a hot August evening to bitterly cold winter twilights, searchlights furrowing the darkening snow to catch the hopeless escapee, machine guns opening up from watchtowers. All that Cold War literature that described Berlin and created the horror myths of the second half of the 20th century, all the taciturn John Le Carré spies, all the wise-cracking Len Deighton operatives, all the grim but gripping thrillers briefly flicker in my head before I’m brought back to the present: a bunch of colourful youngsters on bikes chattering and shouting as they bump across the cobblestones and the twin lines of differently coloured stone that are the only remnants of that great and bloody divide.

On the ‘western’ side there is still the oft-photographed wooden guard hut with a sign on top that says “US Army Checkpoint”. Two German men dressed in US army uniforms and holding a huge Stars and Stripes stand in front of the hut, charging two euros to pose for photographs with tourists. A red-cheeked, bleary-eyed old man occupies a chair at the café on the pavement, taking slugs from a bottle of cheap brandy. Every now and then he mutters imprecations at the world in what sounds like a mangled Scandinavian tongue. A streamlined auto-rickshaw pedals by the man with the flag, the ad on its back demanding the legalization of marijuana. The posh shops and new buildings on Friedrichstrasse look on impassively at the tamasha as normal Berlin traffic patiently waits for the tourist clowns in the circular group-cycle to finish going around the toy guard-house.

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Berlin, as reported in this column two years ago, continues to celebrate a certain dynamic lethargy. It’s unkempt and easy-going, being the least wealthy of the big German cities, the most laid back and industry-free urbs of the one big European economy that’s still robust. It’s still one of the coolest cities in the world, still, as ever, with no desire to be anything other than itself — Berlin — not Frankfurt, not Munich, not Amsterdam, Barcelona or Paris and, mein gott and maago bachao, certainly not London. Even though it’s the biggest German city, population-wise the town is only between three and four million, somewhere around the size of Ahmedabad, Pune and Hyderabad, so clearly it does not have the scale of problems and compulsions that churn the huge population centres of Paris, Madrid or, again, London.

All this demographic logic evaporates when you find yourself sitting outside a small bar-restaurant on a back street on the border between Kreuzberg and Neukölln, two of the classic old East Berlin neighbourhoods. The buildings are older than the Stalin-blocks of the post-War era, very German in their neatness and unadorned design. Except that you are sitting on a pavement drinking good German beer and eating the local version of pizza as you watch kids cycle by, the feeling is that of a para south of Rashbehari Avenue somewhere — small, quiet, laid back and friendly. In a while, in a very non-German, unpunctual while, the stage inside the little establishment begins to come alive with sounds of electric guitars being tuned. Slowly, almost by accident, a blues-adda develops: an excellent piano player wearing a ganji, a thin, tall woman with limbs surrounding a minimal drum set, the typical fat guy on sonorous bass. Around these three characters, changes a parade of young singers, blues guitar-hopefuls, harp players and the oddball violinist from La Réunion. “Pleeese turn down your techno, and let me play my blues!” wails a 20-year-old in the capital of European rave and electronic music. It’s a throwback, it’s limited in a kind of time-warp any Rock-following Calcuttan would recognize, but it’s relaxed, there is no machismo on the small stage: everyone makes space for others physically and musically, all sorts are welcome and the only restriction is a request from the management to turn down the volume slightly after 1 am, just to be considerate to the neighbours.

Heading home at 2 am, every now and then you cross the double line of stones cutting across the middle of streets. All over most of Berlin this is now the only marker of Die Mauer that sawed through people’s lives for a good three decades. Here is a town that seems to have transformed itself without ever forgetting or erasing its history, both good and bad. As a gay couple cycle past me, holding hands as they pedal their bikes, I remember the huge blow-up I’ve seen earlier today, of the kiss between Soviet boss, Leonid Brezhnev, and his East German puppet, Erich Honecker, two of the most evil and unloving men ever to have walked the earth.

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Of course, walls come in many avatars, not all of them manifested in brick, concrete, and electrified razor-wire.

The church of Sacré Cœur was apparently built to celebrate the putting down of the French Revolution. From high on a hill, it looks down on the spread of Paris surrounded by the kitschy genjaam of psuedo-Impressionist detritus: souvenir shops, over-priced bistros and cafes, pushy portrait painters vying to reproduce your features.

Swarming around the church is a thick crowd of tourists, and just around the different sets of steps leading down to the level of the Funiculaire Station a bunch of trinket-sellers squat on the pavement. On a cloth spread before each man is a pile of shiny plastic Eiffel Towers in different sizes of fluorescent red, yellow and blue, mostly keychains and pendants, with some being offered in little cardboard boxes at a slightly higher price. As I walk past with my small group of friends, one of them waves at us. ‘Come’stai!’ he calls out, for some reason having decided we are Italian. Before I can reply in a language I think he might understand better, there is a commotion. “Mamara aastasey! Paalaa, paalaa!” somebody shouts. The trinket-men leap up, scrabbling their goods into the centre of their cloths, grabbing the corners of the cloths and whipping them into sacks. I turn and see a police car bumping slowly across the cobblestones parting the throng of tourists. The men tie their sacks and sprint away down the steps to the Funiculaire but one young guy doesn’t quite manage: his sack slips from his hand as he runs and the cops jump out of the car right where his pile of Eiffel towers have spilled on to the ground. The man is caught between retrieving his stuff and getting away and he freezes on the steps. One of the two young cops is now standing with his boots on either side of the pile of towers pulling on a pair of black gloves. He looks at the Bangladeshi man and gestures with his hand, “Come and pick it up if you dare! Come!” The trinket-man doesn’t move. His cohorts shout conflicting advice to him from below. After two minutes of this stand-off, the cops turn to passing tourists and ask them if they want to take home a free souvenir or two. The tourists descend on the pile of trinkets with the ferocity of locusts, some grabbing whole handfuls. The Bangladeshi man watches this with increasing pain as the cops stare at him. Within a minute all the stuff is gone, the cloth trampled with footprints.

Once the cops leave, another one of the men comes up to survey the situation. S is from Comilla, having reached France through Sweden. Some of the others, from Sylhet and Dhaka, have come via Italy. All of them are figuring out ways to get an ‘Azy’ card as the political asylum permit is known here. Even though S speaks to me in Bangla he remains convinced I am from Nepal.