The Bridge over the River Chai

The Glienicke Bridge, across which Anatoly Shcharansky walked to freedom Tuesday morning, spans a river as frozen as the East-West relations that left Germany, and Berlin itself, sundered in two after the end of the Second World War.

Only military vehicles of the former allies are allowed to use the iron-girdered bridge with its green metal spans, to and from the westernmost point of the West Berlin district of Zehlendorf to Potsdam, once almost a Berlin suburb and now part of East Germany.

The Havel River across which the Glienicke stretches was iced over in today’s sub-zero weather, with swans and ducks struggling to survive on the frozen surface. Under the bridge, the ice had been broken yesterday by an East German icebreaker to allow passage of patrol boats and barges.

The bridge was damaged in World War II and rebuilt. The Soviet authorities, shortly after the division of Germany into zones of allied occupation, named its half of the Glienicke the “Bridge of Unity.” The title, however, was dropped after the Berlin wall was erected in 1961.

Some time later, a plaque was placed at the entrance to the Western side of the bridge. It read, “Those who gave the bridge the name ‘Bridge of Unity’ built the wall, put up barbed wire … and thus prevent freedom.”

Tuesday’s spy swap caps a history of such exchanges at the bridge, going back to the first major such deal in 1962. In that year, American pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union and who was tried and imprisoned there, was exchanged for Soviet agent Rudolf Abel.

The windswept Glienicke Bridge, floodlit at night, subsequently served as the locale of various and sundry cloak-and-dagger derring-do in spy novels and films. None, perhaps, match the sheer-life drama of Tuesday’s events, when one of the most celebrated Soviet dissidents crossed the white line at the center of the Glienicke Bridge to a new life.

It was a freezing cold day, but the sun shone in all its winter brilliance.