West Berlin was an enclave from west Germany deep inside East Germany, and for practical purposes it more or less worked like an island from a logistics perspective, how did that impact daily life?

by phi_array

Was everything more expensive there? We’re supermarkets vastly different from the rest of wester Berlin (like Frankfurt or Hamburg) ?

Also real estate, given WB was an enclave inside East Germany, that means it wasn’t enable to grow beyond the delimited enclave, unlike other German cities, because outside WB it was East Germany (and the wall). Did that have an impact in housing? One example I can think of is Hong Kong because it cannot grow beyond the HK border and that makes HK housing expensive

frenchtoaster

I have a follow-up question: "The Wall" seems to be just between East and West Berlin. What about the west side of West Berlin (between West Berlin and East Germany)? Was it just fences and a larger DMZ which just makes it less interesting/symbolic than the real wall down the middle of Berlin?

Also the canonical "escape story" is across the Wall. Was it actually a particularly easy place to cross, or is that just romanticizing the most dramatic escapes and most "escaping" people actually got out through less dramatic means?