RELIC: At the Berlin Wall Memorial, two kids who were born after the wall came down stop for a little stretching, and maybe showing off. A girl does a headstand, using the remnant of the historic wall for support.
By Jill Schensul
Imagine waking up tomorrow to a world completely changed.
Imagine men are boarding up the windows of your house, so you can’t look across your yard.
Imagine you can’t get to work, because you don’t have a visa to cross to the other side of town.
Imagine a political system that authorises police to shoot you down, for even one step over that line.
For outsiders, the miseries of life behind the Berlin Wall might be hard to imagine. Especially since that era has been so thoroughly eclipsed by the image of Berlin today — a city not just modern, but cutting edge; where once-ravaged streets have been reimagined and rebuilt by a veritable who’s who of celebrity architects; with a growing fashion industry and a long-held presence atop the lists of Coolest Cities in Europe.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, and the city — Germany in general — is taking the opportunity to remember that part of its history, from the time the Wall appeared without warning on August 13, 1961, as a way to literally stop the exodus of citizens from communist East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) to West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), to the moment it fell, also without warning, the night of November 9, 1989.
The big event is scheduled for the weekend of November 9; officials expect an increase in visitors this year because of the anniversary.
But tourists have long flocked to Berlin to see the Wall. Ironic, said one tourism official: Everybody comes to see something that isn’t even there anymore.
But it is.
The Wall, the 12-foot-high, reinforced concrete structure that ran unbroken and impenetrable through the heart of Berlin, separating its East and West versions for nearly 30 years, may not be visible, but it is a presence. A ghost, a miasma, swirling low to the ground, collecting itself up in corners. You may forget it for a while. Then, all of a sudden, in the midst of eating a divine currywurst, or while trying to decide which Soviet lapel pin to buy at the souvenir kiosk near the Checkpoint Charlie crossing point, the ghost takes shape right there before you, shaking his head, wagging his finger. Remember.
People suffered here.
Yes, they did. They also, eventually, rose up and broke through that wall.
That is what finally tipped me into coming to this city of art and ideas and a whole lot of ghosts. I had seen that Wall come down on TV. I cried at the images from far away. All the while wondering how it had gotten there — how it went up, and then grew — in the first place.
I spent 10 days in Berlin — twice as long as I’d initially planned. The more I saw, the more I needed to see. The more I learned about the issues surrounding the rise and fall of the Wall, the greyer the picture became. The more I understood, the less it made sense. The only certainty is that it — that history — is not black and white, the answers never easy. Especially here, I realised, after talking to locals and visitors and learning new details and ironies and nuances.
My focus was on the Wall, but you cannot consider it, or Berlin, in a vacuum. After all, the wall was a product of World War II. And some say World War II was the result of Germany’s economic burdens after World War I. And, well, that’s what I mean. There are no easy answers. It is something Germans today know very well.
Germans have considered the past as they build for the future. Every museum, every new structure, ever memorial and every fallow plot of land to be developed had to take into account its ties to the past. Some argue it is best to consider, and dismiss it; others want the new to be a faithful replacement for the old. But here, people get together, argue (a lot) and come up with some eloquent solutions, underlining the reunification of the country and return to democracy while making some subtle and poignant nods to the past.
Almost everywhere I went in Berlin, I heard someone asking: “Where was the Wall?” The answer might have been right in front of them — or at their feet, more precisely. One of the city’s subtle nods to the Wall is a path made of two rows of cobblestones, a path that wends its way for over 3 miles down sidewalks, around buildings, over curbs and across streets. Cobblestones embedded more than a decade ago and now an official part of the ground, the foundation, of Berlin. Periodically, more obvious bronze plaques, the German “Berliner Mauer 1961-1989,” serve as explanation.
The plaques did get some attention, did get people to stop, hunch down and read them. Others walked on. Drivers were, of course, entirely clueless. On a corner waiting for the traffic light to change, I saw an Audi with its signal on. When the light changed, the car slowly turned, wide wheels rolling blithely over the cobblestones. Just a tiny shift of the steering wheel, and this man had gone from the once-East Berlin to the once-West Berlin, without so much as breaking a bead of sweat.
The image — maybe the ghost — gave me goose bumps.
It was the first of many times I had that reaction on my exploration of Berlin.
Berlin Wall Memorial
Birds were chirping. The happy sound was disquieting here in this place devoted to sadness. Kids just let out of school were ambling across the expansive lawn, sporting backpacks and soccer balls and cellphones. Tourists arrived, by taxi and tour bus and bicycle. They took pictures of the long stretch of the Wall that forms one boundary of the 10-acre site. I watched them read the plaques, heads cocked. I watched as two preteen girls paused to practice handstands beside the Berlin Wall, pressing their feet against it for balance.
The girls, I bet, had no idea that 25 years ago if they’d set so much as a toe on the ground where they were then upside down, they could very well have been shot dead by East German guards.
This setting was a stretch of no man’s land between West and East, a place so dangerous and so off-limits that it earned the nickname Death Strip.
The Berlin Wall Memorial is the country’s most comprehensive remembrance of that era. Situated almost exactly in the centre of the city, the memorial follows the path of the Wall for just under a mile along historic Bernauer Strasse.
Not only does it incorporate one of the largest sections of the Wall, this stretch is the only one that includes the other features of its final version. The most important of those being the Death Strip.
The Wall was much more than the tall concrete monolith most of us know from photographs.
It went through a variety incarnations, starting as a hastily erected barbed wire fence when it appeared on the morning of August 13.
The memorial’s location, too, is significant. In this neighbourhood, the wall was especially disruptive because its route relegated houses on the southern side of Bernauer Strasse to East Berlin, while the sidewalks