As every year in spring, thousands of cherry trees bloom in Berlin, trees loaded with a message for the capital of Germany, because they were planted in places that were not entirely by chance. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an ominous barrier that for more than 28 years divided the city in two as a symbol of the Cold War, a Japanese television organized a fundraising campaign in their country to give away Japanese cherry blossoms ( prunus serrulata) to Berlin.
The Japanese society responded enthusiastically to the appeal of the private channel TV Asahi; 140 million yen were collected, the equivalent of one million euros. Starting in 1990 –the year of the reunification of Germany– 9,180 Japanese cherry trees were thus able to be planted in Berlin and in the surrounding land of Brandenburg, a territory that had formed part of the former communist GDR. The trees were placed in sections of the old route of the Wall or in significant places of the painful history of partition of the city, according to the decision of a German-Japanese committee.
The first cherry trees arrived in November 1990 at the Glienicke bridge, near Potsdam, known as the bridge of spies because there were exchanges of captured agents between the two antagonistic blocs, the powers of the capitalist West and East Germany as front line of the soviet world. The last ones were planted in 2010 near the Mauerpark (Wall Park), an elongated garden in eastern Berlin that is located on a stretch of undeveloped scar left by the barrier when it disappeared. Around the Mauerpark there are about 200 copies.
The longest cherry blossom avenue is rightly named TV-Asahi-Kirschblütenallee (TV Asahi Cherry Blossom Avenue). It displays a thousand trees in its two kilometers, aligned on both sides of the former boundary of the Wall between the Berlin neighborhood of Lichterfelde and the town of Teltow, in the Land of Brandenburg.
Wandering through these places is impressive. The central space, where happy people now walk in the sun, was the so-called death strip, and the two rows of cherry trees that delimit it are located on what were once the two retaining walls. Because the Berlin Wall, 43 kilometers long, was not one, but two. The structure that began as a rudimentary cement and wire fence barrier evolved into a fortification consisting of two walls with a security zone in the middle, watchtowers and high spotlights, and a command to shoot fugitives.
According to official data, between 1961 and 1989 at least 140 people died on the wall between East Berlin and West Berlin, the majority by shots while fleeing but also by mishaps linked to the method of escape or by suicide upon being discovered; or by shooting and accidents without them trying to flee, both East and West Germans. That number includes eight East German soldiers.
Adding the estimated victims in the section of wall that separated West Berlin from the rest of the GDR (112 kilometers), the figure rises to about 600 deaths. On the other hand, in those years, some 5,000 East Germans managed to cross the Wall and escape.
The cherry blossoms are now one more way to remember and honor the deaths and suffering caused by that ignominious barrier. The donation campaign launched by TV Asahi was the brainchild of its then Berlin correspondent, Tetsuo Terasaki, who had lived in the western sector since 1973 and was overjoyed to see the Wall fall. In Japan, the cherry blossom (sakura) is highly valued as a symbol of the arrival of spring and invites us to reflect on the ephemeral, as it has a short life.
It is also a sign of friendship, and that is how the donation of trees to Berlin was proposed, as a gift for reunification and as a sign of friendship from the Japanese. Even children gave small amounts of their allowances. The custom of going to contemplate flowers (hanami) has a long tradition in Japan, and is also taking off in Berlin. More and more visitors come to see the Berlin cherry trees and flood social networks with photos of their exquisite blossoms.
