Hi Len
thank you for your kind reply. I'll try to answer your questions as far as
I can:
>A couple of months ago we went through a discussion about this bridge,
>and how far below it West Berliner sovereignty extended, or if the
>tracks directly under the bridge were West, meaning that when the
>trains passed under the bridge, that they passed through west
>territory for perhaps the 5 meters that the bridge above was wide.
Could you or anyone else please tell me the message-no. or subject of this
discussion? The Yahoo search function isn't really very helpful.
>that the bridge was west and the ground below east.
>
>I have a letter from the Senator fur Bau und Wohnungswesen from 1985,
>where I wrote and asked that question. He sent me a copy of the
>agreement with East Germany about the Steinstuecken corridor, and very
>detailed maps - but couldn't answer the question definitively.
Incidentally, if it isn't too much work - could you scan these maps? I'd be
very much interested in them. Are they the maps which are part of the
treaty (which I don't have), or different ones? I'm interested whatever
they are.
>He sent a copy of the treaty, but said the question wasn't addressed
>there - which, atfer reading it, I agreed with. Where did you get the
>info that the ground was East?
From the same treaty. Strange that we come at different conclusions, maybe
we can sort it out. My copy is from an East German collection of documents
called "Das Vierseitige Abkommen über Westberlin und seine Realisierung"
(note spelling "Westberlin" in one word without hyphen, which was the
official GDR spelling) (steinstuecken_abkommen-cover.jpg). Document
24. from this book is "Vereinbarung ... über die Regelung der Fragen von
Enklaven durch Gebietsaustausch" dated 20. Dec. 1971, Article 1:
"Vom Vollzug dieser Vereinbarung an gehören [...] zu den Westsektoren
Berlins - ein Gebietsstreifen entlang der Eisenbahnstgrecke Seddin - Berlin
(West) von ca. 1 km Länge und 20 m Breite sowie die von diesem
Gebietsstreifen vor Steinstücken nach Westen abzweigende Straße bis zur
westlichen Straßengrenze der Teltower Straße in der Breite der Fahrbahn von
ca. 3 m einschließlich der Brücke als Zugänge nach Steinstücken."
rough translation: With the fulfilment of this treaty, territory of West
Berlin shall be - a strip of land along the railway Seddin - Berlin of 1 km
x 20m , the street branching off it to the west before Steinstücken
_including the bridge_, as accesses to Steinstücken.
I added another map of Steinstücken as illustration how I read this. The
original is steinstuecken_195x.jpg, an official Senate map from some time
in the 1950s. My interpretation is steinstuecken_painted.jpg:
First we have the old territory of Steinstücken: green
Then the treaty adds the corrdidor: red
The street branching off to the west: yellow
Including the bridge: blue
The treaty explicitly says "the bridge" and nothing else. It doesn't say
"the territory under the bridge", or "defined by the edges of the bridge"
or whatever. So apparently the part of the railway underneath wasn't
included. This interpretation is confirmed by some of the more accurate
city maps (one of which I've included in the last mail), which paint the
border "underneath" the bridge.
Incidentally, this map is from the back of a book "Berlin-Steinstücken,
Insel vor der Insel" of which I've also included the front cover
(steinstuecken_insel-cover.jpg). ISBN 3-7678-0788-2
>If the tracks pass through the
>southern portion of Steinstucken (i.e., the train is in the west for a
>short distance at the south side of Steinstuecken, why would the train
>not just as easily pass through the west twice, once at the south side
>and the second time when it was under the road bridge on the north
>side.
The point isn't the rail. It was a route from and to West Berlin anyway, so
it was no problem if it went through a bit of Western territory once more.
The point of the treaty was to get road access under Western control to all
parts of Steinstücken with as little territory ceded as possible (because
it cost money). The part of Steinstücken geographically west of the rail
route had a special problem, because there was no road access there even
with the corridor. So they had to get the street north of Steinstücken, and
the bridge. Since they didn't need the rail underneath it, that wasn't ceded.
>How about the footbridge that crosses the tracks in the
>middle of Steinstuecken, that led over the tracks from the East half
>of Steinstuecken to the West half near the helicopter denkmal?
The footbridge is at the beginning of the S-shaped curve of
Bernhard-Beyer-Str. Both that bridge and the rail beneath are therefore in
the West.
>Why would the treatymakers not just split Steinstuecken into two pieces,
>split by the tracks? Why leave only a portion of the tracks in the
>east?
They apparently didn't care about the rail at all. The fact that part of
the rail into Steinstücken was eastern territory had been so before, as you
can see on the original map. The added corridor territories around it just
made that fact more obvious.
Last not least, just for the fun of it, I've also included a city map of
Potsdam from 1980 printed in East Germany (steinstuecken_1980.jpg). East
Berlin and Potsdam maps from that time used to omit West Berlin completely
and paint it unicolour, which sometimes really gives strange effects. The
enclaves look like holes punched into the city ...
Hope you enjoy this.
wolfgang