A Turkish Gardener's Onion Patch Becomes Berlin's Last Cold War Battleground
On a traffic island once claimed by neither East nor West, supporters fight to save a ramshackle treehouse from the wrecking ball
By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
In 1983, a Turkish "guest worker" named Osman Kalin went looking for a patch of earth to grow onions, garlic and cucumbers. He found it on a sliver of no man's land beside the Berlin Wall — technically part of communist East Berlin, though geography had stranded it on the western side of the barrier.
Kalin built a garden there. Then, over the years, he built up: a ramshackle two-storey structure that came to be known as the Treehouse at the Wall. It survived the fall of the Wall in 1989, the reunification that followed, and decades of Kreuzberg's transformation around it.
Now supporters are fighting to save it again, this time from safety inspectors who consider the structure a hazard rather than a monument, according to the Guardian. Advocates want it preserved as a memorial to Germany's postwar foreign laborers — the guest workers, mostly from Turkey, who rebuilt West Germany's economy from the 1960s onward and whose contribution is still often left out of the country's official memory of the Cold War.
The stakes here are small in the way that matters most: one leaning building on one traffic island. But the argument over what to do with it is really an argument about who gets remembered when a wall comes down — the diplomats and the tank commanders, or the man with a garden trowel who simply refused to leave.
Nothing happens "over there" anymore.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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