The air is ripe with the scent of warm grass and wildflowers as our group of jet-lagged, straight-off-the-plane reporters stroll along a concrete path at Germany’s Point Alpha memorial site and museum. Our guide, Monika Held, a longtime resident of the area, points to our feet. “We are standing right now on the death pass,” she says. “Twenty years ago you would have been shot on sight.”

It’s a sobering thought and one that seems completely at odds with the peacefulness of our surroundings. But now, 20 years after the reunification of East and West Germany, on Oct. 3, 1990, Point Alpha stands as a stark reminder of the hair-trigger tension that once marked Cold War relations between the Communist Eastern Bloc and the West.

Located about an hour from Frankfurt, on a sleepy stretch of road leading to the pretty village of Geisa, Point Alpha boasts the best-preserved remains of the 1,400-kilometre Iron Curtain that divided Germany (and most of Europe) for almost half a century. It is presided over by two watchtowers — one in the former East Germany, one in West Germany — looming chest to chest like pugilists locked in combat. Between them runs a narrow tract of land with sections of what the East Germans (with no hint of irony) called The Anti-Fascist Protection Wall: a high wire-mesh fence once booby-trapped with automatic spring guns, patrolled by armed guards and surrounded by a landmine-studded no man’s land.

As we wander the former NATO base where American soldiers guarded against a possible invasion by the Soviet Union, it feels eerily as if the troops just left — there’s even a circa 1980s Playboy pin-up on one of the lockers. The adjacent museum contains a recreation of a border-crossing point and a collection of guns, uniforms, military vehicles and memorabilia that commemorate the Wall, and the estimated 1,000 people who died trying to cross it. “We would hear explosions in the night,” recalls Held, whose family home bordered the Wall. “If a fox or a rabbit touched a mine, it would explode. We never knew if it was an animal or a human.”

The view from Point Alpha’s watchtowers now is of rolling hills with patches of canola glowing gaudily yellow against a clear blue sky. In a twist of fate, a large portion of the former death strip has actually become “a line of living,” Held says. Isolated for 40 years, it became a haven from industry and chemicals for flora and fauna, including the endangered fish otter, black stork and many species of orchids.

Recently, the German government turned over most of the land, ranging in width from about 27 metres to 910 metres, to the relevant German states at no charge. Now you can bike, hike or kayak large sections of the Iron Curtain Trail. It’s an activity many Germans regard as a “pilgrimage of peace.”

Two decades ago that would have seemed like an impossible dream. In fact, it took the legacy of peaceful protest in Leipzig — an oft-ignored city in the former East Germany and a later stop on our journey — to ease the way for the seemingly abrupt “fall of the Wall.”

“This was the centre of it all,” explains Leipzig tour guide Birgit Scheffel, gesturing to the small cobblestoned churchyard at Nicolaikirche (St. Nicholas Church) in the centre of town. In 1982, a group of peaceniks began meeting here, initially to protest nuclear weapons and environmental abuses. These “Monday Protests” were tolerated by the hard-line Communist government, mainly because they were a church-based movement and generally attracted no more than a handful of people holding candles and chanting dona nobis pacem (“give us peace”). But in 1989, the protests began to expand, eventually attracting thousands of people.

Soldiers tried to crack down, but that only served to galvanize the movement, until finally, on Oct. 9, 1989, about 70,000 people descended on the churchyard, then spread out along the ring road that encircles Leipzig, hand in hand.

“We were told we would have a Chinese Solution,” Scheffel says, referring to the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. “But the police could not shoot because we all wanted the same things. We came in peace.” The unrest spread to other East German cities, including Berlin, which began to see protests of its own. The rest, of course, is history.

When German reunification took place, Scheffel admits, Leipzig was a dreary mess, filled with crumbling buildings, stinking waterways and ill-tended parks. “Nothing had been done for 50 years,” she says. Apartments in the town’s lovely 17th-century buildings often had shared bathrooms and no showers or central heat. Scheffel, who lived in one, says her bedroom “was cold as a crypt.” As a result, the sought-after addresses were the aesthetically bereft communist, cinder-block prefabs.

Leipzig has since undergone a renaissance. Its 200 kilometres of waterways have become trendy spots for condos, cafes and restaurants (although still occasionally a bit ripe). Its archaic factories have been converted to trendy artist’s co-ops and lofts, and fully 40% of its land is devoted to green space. A popular local pastime involves cycling from beer garden to beer garden through the leafy forests and parks. OK, a popular local pastime is drinking. Period. “We say a man without a beer belly is a cripple,” Scheffel says.

Finally, thanks to the (rather unpopular) 6% “solidarity fee” — a tax imposed on the Wessies (West Germans) to rebuild the East — the decay of Leipzig’s graceful old buildings has been largely reversed. Within a few short blocks in the Old Town we visit Thomaskirche, where Leipzig’s most celebrated resident, Johann Sebastian Bach, was choirmaster for almost 30 years (he’s buried under the altar); the magnificent Renaissance-era Old Town Hall, and the famous Auerbachskeller, among the oldest continuously operating beer halls in Germany, where a key scene in Goethe’s Faust was set.

One of the most fascinating stops, though, has to be the former Stasi (German Secret Service) headquarters, now a museum, which offers a glimpse into the paranoia that ruled in the former German Democratic Republic (as the communist regime referred to itself). There are cameras, peepholes and listening equipment used by the Stasi to spy on the population. There’s a steamer, used to open envelopes from the West and fake postage stamps — from such places as Rome, Brussels and Vienna — meant to obscure the fact that the mail had been tampered with. “Sometimes they spelled the place names wrong,” Scheffel says.

She doesn’t particularly like to visit the Stasi Museum. “Always I come in and I smell the linoleum; I feel sick.” Still, she believes it’s important to remember what life was like. “People sometimes idealize the former GDR,” she says. They recall that there was no homelessness, no unemployment and a daycare space for every child.

But Scheffel is all too familiar with the web of surveillance that invaded people’s privacy and sapped their trust in one another. After reunification, she took advantage of the opportunity to access her Stasi records, only to find that her best friend’s husband had been an informant, reporting on the comings and goings of all of his friends.

“It was very hard,” she says. “But it was the way we lived. There were spies everywhere. There was no freedom to travel or to speak your mind. Some things were good during the former GDR. But now it is better.”