This map shows what happened next in the minds of the East German authorities: West Berlin atrophied, ceasing to exist as anything but a minor irritant to cartographers.The area served by the green S-Bahn is proudly marked as
Berlin, its lines overflowing into the neighbouring districts of Potsdam and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. A clever ruse explains the diminutive size of
Berlin (West): the lines extending westward into Potsdam district are shown on a separate map, overlapping the main map. The missing distance is rendered by arrows, connecting the lines on both maps. Those lines completely encircle West Berlin, greatly diminished by the overlap. Intriguingly, the overlap, where East eats West, creates two holes in the
Staatsgrenze (national border) between both Berlins. Loopholes in the East’s cartographic logic? The encircling East Berlin lines look a bit like Pac-Man, the puny West Berlin nothing more than a freshly eaten, half-digested enemy.
It is quite remarkable how Berlin (West) is presented simply as a nondescript obstacle: not a single landmark is named, as if it is deepest, darkest Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nor are any of the S-Bahn or U-Bahn lines shown.
bigthink.com
