KEY POINTS:
About five metres from the hotel I stayed in at the centre of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz while I was attending the IFA consumer electronics show last week, is a line of red bricks, two deep, embedded flush with the road and pavement, pushing on determinedly in either direction.
It's
where the Berlin Wall used to stand, dividing the city physically and the world ideologically. Potsdamer is an important part of Berlin, an old trading point in the seventeenth century, it sat at the converging point of several country roads. A wall through Potsdamer was first built in the seventeenth century, so that taxes could be levied on goods passing through the customs point.
When the first railway tracks were laid there in 1838, they had to stop at the customs wall. Later, Potsdamer became a bustling commercial and cultural centre and according to Wikipedia, the scene of a number of technological firsts.
Possibly the first street lights in the world were installed there by Siemens in 1882. Europe's first traffic lights followed in 1924 and in 1923, Germany's first radio broadcast was made from a building close by.
But Potsdamer's close proximity to many important Reich buildings led to it being leveled during the war by allied bombers and it stayed barren ground until after the Wall had fallen and Roger Waters had put on his massive concert The Wall there in 1990.
Today, Potsdamer Platz is once again a gleaming metropolis and a powerful representation of the globalised world Thomas Friedman talks about in his great book The World Is Flat. Friedman considers the fall of the Berlin Wall one of the "ten forces that flattened the world". The rise of the Windows PC is another.
"The rise of the Windows-enabled PC, combined with the fall of the Wall, set in motion the whole flattening process," writes Friedman.
"And once more and more people connected their Windows-enabled PCs with that global communications platform, which spread even more quickly after 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down (and China and India started opening to the global economy), there was nothing to stop the digital representation of everything - words, music, photos, data, video - and then the global exchange of all that digital information."
I was thinking about this as I walked around IFA, where old European electronics titans brushed shoulders with newer entrants from Korea and China, but just about everyone was manufacturing their products in the same place - wherever is most cost-effective to do so today.
If there's any industry more symbolic of the globalisation that has become such a dominant force since the Wall came down, it's the electronics industry.
And such is impact of globalisation, some design engineers from Philips who were at IFA, told me that the lines dividing the tastes and requirements of consumers around the world are starting to dissolve too.
Once, a company like Philips would have had to design a TV specifically for the Russians (chunky), another for the Americans (packed with features) and a different one entirely for the Germans (minimalist).
But in the era of globalisation, billions of people have access to the same technology on the same terms, subject to the same standards, so electronics companies can now design for a global market. Apple's iPod is living proof of a product that has universal global appeal based on one design.
I was only 10 years old when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. I remember taking a break from my after-school cartoon-viewing to watch on TV a bunch of Germans smashing chunks out of a massive wall with sledgehammers.
The geopolitical details went over my head, but I could sense this was a globally significant event, the end of an era. I've grown up in the one that followed, the era of globalisation, and come to take it for granted.
But talk to any Berliner, like the tour guide who accompanied me around the city in a beaten up old Trabant and they'll tell you about what it was like before the Wall came down.
There's little nostalgia for that time, when Potsdamer Platz was an empty field and ideology prevented the world from connecting the way it does today.
