Beware--you'll get sucked in. It has quite a long and interesting history, and for obvious reasons, no other city is quite like it.
If you follow the links on that page to the images of the building of the Wall, you'll see one of the signal stories of the dividing of Berlin: Bernauer Strasse. This was the famous street where houses were in the East, but the sidewalk just outside was in the West, so in the early days all one had to do is climb down through a window. Those exits were bricked up fairly quickly. Eventually, the houses were all torn down as the Wall became permanent, and a church that lay in No Man's Land just inside the eastern side was actually blown up only a few years before the Wall came down.
The Wall years are full of evocative stories such as ghost subway stations, weird little bits of land that were Western and Eastern by strange quirks and suffered interesting fates (look up the Lenne Triangle for one of them), and daring or tragic escape attempts.
I think we Canadians have much to be thankful for; if comparatively uneventful lives are something to be thankful for.
