Glienicke Bridge
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Transcript
This bridge became famous as a place for exchanging captured spies, but its everyday role was even more revealing. During the Cold War it crossed the frontier between West Berlin and East German Potsdam, turning an ordinary transport link into controlled geopolitical infrastructure.
Several high-profile exchanges gave it the nickname “Bridge of Spies,” including the 1962 swap involving Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel and American pilot Francis Gary Powers. Those events were dramatic, but the larger story is a divided region in which bridges could cease to connect. After 1989, the same structure resumed the mundane job that political borders had interrupted.