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petermichael von bawey is an essayist, teacher and poet. He is based in Rural France.

   A European Identity: The Berlin Wall from Frontier to Memorial

A European Identity: The Berlin Wall from Frontier to Memorial

SSEI 10th International Conference, The European Mind: Narrative and Identity, Malta.

An ideological anomaly within the Soviet Zone of Occupation, West Berlin, mere remains of a world metropolis reduced to three sectors held by the Western Allies, emerged as a besieged city sixteen years before construction of the Wall.

The confrontations of the super-powers occurred soon after US Forces marched through Charlottenburg Gate on 4 July 1945, marking their presence in the heart of Soviet territory. Two years later with the currency reform of the Western Allies and the subsequent Soviet response with a land, water and rail blockade of the city, world attention converged on the Berlin Air Lift in 1948-49, ending with the survival of West Berlin.

World news focused again on Berlin with Khrushchev’s Ultimatum in 1958 to sign a peace treaty with East Germany, not recognized in the West, and to transform Berlin into a “demilitarized free city.” The rejection by the Western Allies of the proposal shifted the “German Problem” to the East German leader Ulbricht’s advocacy for building the Wall. Throughout these crises of the super-powers, West Berlin was center stage to Cold War politics in Europe and its identity with western democracy was established.

Yet the enclosure of West Berlin with barbed wire, cement blocks, soldiers of the People’s Army, Worker’s Brigades and armored vehicles in the night of 13 August 1961 surprised politicians and shocked people in the West. By morning all inter-city transportation, automobile traffic, trains, trams, subways, river barrages or pedestrian movement from the eastern to the western sectors of Berlin came to a halt. That freeze on urban mobility lasted over 28 years, ending 9 November 1989.

Memorials in Fortress City

For nearly three decades West Berlin was sealed-in with a 166 kilometers belt of Wall, of which 48 kilometers ran through the city’s center. On its frontier with West Germany, East Germany built five kilometers “forbidden zone” to hinder escapes; however, the divide in Berlin’s center was, for the most, at least 50 meters in width consisting of the following barriers: the hinterland Wall of concrete panels, electrical contact fences with alarms, observation towers every 100 meters, protective bunkers, warning devices, trip wires and spotlights, dog patrol tracks, convoy paths with vehicles, automatic lighting systems, raked, sand control tracts and, finally, the western Wall of prefabricated cement segments topped with concrete pipe coverings. In reality there was far more than a Wall that separated East from West Berlin: there was a complex wall fortification, one that was modernized over the years with more advanced technology.2 Sealed off from its hinterland, divided from its eastern districts, West Berlin became the “Frontstadt,” frontier city, dynamic and defiant on the dark edge of communism. It was an inverted “fortress city” with its fortified borders neither protecting the population within its walls nor intending to keep outsiders out. Vauban that superb engineer of city fortifications under Louis XIV might have marveled at the ingenuity of the elaborate barriers, but surely he would have been puzzled that such a fortification divided rather than protected a city.

The East German builders argued that the Wall was an “anti-fascist rampart” protecting the proletariat and preventing West German imperialists from sabotaging the mission of developing “real, existing socialism.” 3Yet since the Wall fortifications were directed eastward, the intended spoiler of “real, existing socialism” could only come from the citizens of East Germany, who, despite official ideology and the Wall’s fortifications sought to flee to the West.

From the Wall’s construction to 1988, 4,975 East Germans breached the frontier of fortified West Berlin to receive welcome, shelter and the possibility of resettlement in the West. Even guardians fled with 560 East German border troops escaping to West Berlin. Yet 239 East Germans died attempting to cross the Wall, the last in April 1989 a mere six months before the Wall fell.4

With the first deaths, the frontier was labeled the “Wall of Shame” in the West and spontaneous markers—wreaths, flowers, and crosses—were planted in memory of the Wall’s victims. Some of these spontaneous markers, the first memorials, remain: at the Oberbaum Bridge in the former US sector Kreuzberg stands to this day a large cross at the shore of the Spree River in memory of an unknown escapee who reached freedom only in death on 8 October 1962.

On Bernauer Strasse where apartment blocks were on the east with street entrances to the west, East Berliners jumped out of windows before they were bricked up. Flowers and wreaths marked the spot where four escapees died in August 1961.5

One of the most known and early markers was a wooden cross erected near the Wall in memory of the cruel death of Peter Fechter. Just 18 years old, Fechter attempted to flee with his friend on 17 August 1962. His friend scaled the Wall successfully near Checkpoint Charlie, whereas East German guards shot Fechter twice in the back and the abdomen, letting him bleed to death, neither giving him medical assistance nor permitting West Germans from doing so. In memory of that unnecessary death, the first notable marker was erected and a street named after Fechter. Only in 1998 was the wooden cross removed; today a bronze column stands on the sidewalk of Zimmerstrasse in remembrance of the victim; however, the street no longer bears his name.6

These early spontaneous markings were the first memorials of the Wall’s victims, public remembrances of the lethal force applied by East German border guards against its own citizens.

Alois Riegl, as early as 1903, distinguished between intentional and unintentional monuments.7 The sites where escapees were killed by East German border guards and honored by West Berliners with markers were unintentional, spontaneous constructions documenting injustice and giving a public memory to the victims.

The first intentional monument in memory of the Wall’s victims was built in November 1961 on the middle walkway of the broad 17 June Street, several hundred meters from the Wall. Its inconspicuous location, small cement-block form and discreet inscription may have contributed to its neglect by the public, whereas the spontaneous and unintentional monuments located on or near the spot of the victim’s death by the Wall, drew public notice and became predecessors of the current memorials like the official Bernauer Street Memorial.

Front Line of the Free World

Timid and slow in response to the erection of the Berlin Wall, President Kennedy first sent a US Army Brigade and Vice-President Johnson to West Berlin on 19 August 1961 to assure the population that it was not abandoned. However, Kennedy’s visit to West Berlin on 26 June 1963, six months after Khrushchev’s appearance at the Wall, was a memorable event that not only uplifted the moral of West Berliners, strengthened the Western Allies resolve to “contain” communism, but marked the Berlin Wall as the “front line” in the Cold War struggle. If democracy was not perfect, Kennedy stated, it “never had to put a wall up to keep people in.” And if there are those who “don’t understand…what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world….Let them come to Berlin.” For Kennedy, a liberal, and for “Cold Warriors” of the right, William F. Buckley, Jr., for example, the Berlin Wall was identified as the great European divide between choice and force, freedom and oppression, liberty and tyranny.

Kennedy raised West Berlin to a global symbol, a universal value of the western democracy’s struggle for freedom with his declaration: “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.”

If, Kennedy reflected, “Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was ‘civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’” and with that declaration the US President proclaimed that the struggle for liberty was central to West Berlin, where the front line of the free world stood, and the Berlin Wall was its limit.7

Twenty-four years later President Reagan heralded a similar sentiment by stating that “We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it’s our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom.”

Like Kennedy, Reagan relied on the rhetorical trope of synecdoche to perceive the Berlin Wall “cutting through your city” as the “brutal division of a continent” that remains “imprinted… upon the mind of the world” and “…as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand…the question of freedom for all mankind” remains open.”8

For both US presidents, the Berlin Wall was not only identified as a structure symbolizing divided Europe, it was raised as well to a global “icon of division” that separated tyranny from freedom.

Wall Destruction

With the breach of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the general response of the Berlin populace was to dismantle it as quickly as possible. As early as 10 November, the once menacing Wall was perceived with new eyes as thousands of people occupied, walked or sat on it with East German border guards standing by helplessly. New openings of the Wall were reported worldwide on a daily basis.

The official dismantling of the Berlin Wall began in June 1990. Since the Wall’s breach, the East German government had opened border crossings and the populace had responded to the Wall with hammer and chisel, chipping and peeking morsels out of the cement edifice. With wall peckers transforming the once impregnable construction into million fragments and East German border guards removing Wall segments for recycling into road gravel, the more decorative, painted Wall sections were collected for sale in auction by an enterprising group of Limex-Bau Export-Import of East Berlin and LeLe Berlin Wall of West Berlin. On 21 June 1990, eighty-one segments with wall art by Thierry Noire and Kiddy Citny were sold at Galerie Park Palace in Monaco for 1.3 million DM or 650,000 Euros.9 In East Germany, a mere three months before its demise, the Conservator General began designating so-called “historic pieces” of the Wall for preservation as “historic monuments.” In West Germany, Willy Brandt, major of West Berlin when the Wall was built and former chancellor, expressed the view “…a bit, just a bit of this revolting edifice might be left standing to help remember a historical monstrosity.”10 With one official and many unofficial memorials of the Wall’s victims standing in West Berlin, the Wall’s rupture added the new element of Wall conservation: one, as aesthetic object, the other as object of horror, reminder of a “historical monstrosity” as Brandt had remarked.

Despite its cause of great unhappiness and violent death, its burden of negative memories, the Berlin Wall was deemed too significant historically, or even partially too aesthetic, to disappear completely. Destroyed in its totality, the Wall was deemed worthy to remain in parts as traces of the Cold War division, as markers of protest, and as remembrances of its victims.

Wall Memorials

Today at least eighteen sections of the Berlin Wall stand. Some are neglected, little known fragments in back streets of the city: a hinterland Wall section or a crumbling watch tower; others are easily recognized or official memorials in prestige urban sites.

The Berlin Wall segments remaining, whether official sites or not, are all intentional monuments that embrace the two German words and meanings for memorial: the one is “Denkmahl” or site of a historical event/person designated for public honor and/or public reflection; the other is “Mahnmal” or site of admonishment in remembrance of a negative collective experience.

Both kinds of sites merit conservation serving as “historical lessons” for humanity. Yet the Mahnmal embodies “historical lesions,” or remembrance of traumatic human suffering, adding a negative significance to the historical lessons.

Segments of the Berlin Wall stand as both Denkmahl and as Mahnmal: some in remembrance of the victims, others in memory of a “historical monstrosity.”

Memorials are sites open to debates of the public’s “will to remember” or “will to forget,” particularly if witnesses of negative experiences are still alive or if national or international politics challenge these “spatial markers of memory.”

Remains of the Berlin Wall are frequent objects of such debates, or of nuanced versions of “what to remember.” Wall memorials have invited questions of where the weight of memory should fall.

Nearly seventeen years after the Wall’s fall debates continue of how to evaluate the remains scattered around Berlin. The public response of 10 November 1989 was to tear down the Wall and remove it. Similar views are expressed currently, yet with the passage of time they are formulated differently.

If elements of the Wall are historical lessons or reminders of the Cold War and of the German past, how representative are they? Asked from the historian’s or from the conservationist’s perspective: at what level do the Wall segments standing become authentic witnesses of the past? What criteria used in evaluating remaining Wall segments offer a sense of “what actually occurred historically?”

For the guardians of historical sites, a central criterion is that of authenticity. Discussants at an international conference on conversation selected the following criteria for the evaluation of historical sites: authenticity of form, material, technique, function and site.11 Taking that measurement, all the remaining Berlin Wall segments have lost most if not all the criteria of authenticity---certainly function and technique were the first to go as early as 9-10 November 1989, the day the Wall was breached. Destruction by natural elements and wall peckers has dramatically changed the form of the Wall segments remaining. In addition, material has been transformed with Wall segments cemented over to cover the damage caused by enthusiastic iconoclasts. Finally, select Wall segments have been moved from original sites and relocated to others, serving as decorations, for example, in front of major corporations on Potsdamer Platz, as historical documents in the Berlin Historical Museum, or as historical reminders of the Cold War or as aesthetic objects in Hawaii, New York or Los Angeles, to name only a few sites of relocation.

Politics of Memory

On 20 June 2006, the Berlin Senate approved the allocation of fifty million dollars to “preserve the history of the wall that divided the city for three decades during the Cold War.” The Senate’s vote was based on the sixty-five pages Gesamtkonzept, or Berlin’s encompassing plan to retain memory of the Berlin Wall in documentations, memorials and sites of information.12

Approved and edited by the city’s minister of culture Thomas Flierl, the plan envisions highlighting six key sites, favoring the Bernauer Street Memorial Center, known to Germans, mostly to old Berliners, rather than the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie or the “Checkpoint Charlie Museum,” acknowledged worldwide with over 700,000 visitors annually. !3

For Germans, Bernauer Street arguably more than other sites may represent the absurd and brutal measures taken by the East German government to imprison its people and as such exemplifies the ordinary—a normal neighborhood with truncated apartment blocks, detonated church in the ‘death zone,’ graveyard spoiled and streets divided—become extraordinary German reality, personifying the brute force of division during the Cold War.

Given that German-German history, Bernauer Strasse was designated official memorial site by the municipal government and opened 13 August 1998. Using 210 frontline Wall segments, the architects of Kohlhass and Kohlhass designed the Memorial. Facing it, a Documentation Center was built with an extensive archive of books, films, photographs and witness accounts of the Wall’s history.

The Kohhass design includes a 200 meters section of front line and hinterland Wall segments separated by the fifty meters stretch of control and death strips, where a watchtower stands. On its northern side, a thick, iron plate cuts through the entire fifty meters, connecting frontline with hinterland Wall, and completing the Memorial.

The visitor is directed to the space in front of the hinterland Wall, and by looking through narrow, chiseled slits has a limited view of the control and death strips, the watchtower and the frontline Wall in the West.

During the Wall’s reign, visitors stood on platforms in the west, surveying the Wall’s formable barriers, at the Bernauer Memorial visitors are on the eastern side, peeking through Wall gashes to glimpse the barrier and possible freedom on the other side. Here the Memorial elicits “reflected memory,” soliciting the visitor’s “uncovering” of the past, and appealing to “thoughtful reflection” of the past.

A more direct statement was the inscription on the iron plate, dated 13 August 1998, reading:

Berlin Memorial
In Memory of the Division of the City
From 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989
And in Remembrance of its Victims
Erected by the Federal Republic and the Land of Berlin

This inscription unleashed a fierce public debate prompting a revision with the following formulation: “And in Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Despotism.” With the addition pasted over the original, another debate ensued resulting in a new iron plate stating that “Communist Despotism” was indeed responsible for deaths along the Wall.14

In spite of the financial favors bestowed on, and the political gestures made toward, the Bernauer Memorial, the “Haus” at Checkpoint Charlie is still—and was in the past—an international landmark with millions of Germans and international visitors reminded via documentation, photos, artifacts, posters, films, paintings of the Wall’s ruthless injustice and of its consequent human tragedies, yet representing as well the heroic defiance and individual triumphs in challenging communism through the ingenious means escapees used to transgress the Wall and flee to the West.

Another site favored in the Gesamtkonzept is the East Side Gallery, which will receive millions of euros for renovations.15

Just before and during the dismantling of the Wall from May to October 1990, 118 artists from 21 countries participated in painting over one kilometer of Wall in the former East German district of Friedrichshain. Normally the Wall in the east would consist of inferior cement typical of the hinterland construction, but this site was where official visitors of the state traveled from the airport. Thus the Wall received the same superior frontline construction as the Wall facing the west, permitting artists to paint images on a smooth surface shortly before the disappearance of East Germany. An argument can be made that the East Side Gallery, recognized as official Wall Memorial in 1992, is an inversion of historical events. No paintings were possible on the so-called “friendly side” of the Wall in East Berlin. Painting only happened in the West were Berliners freely interacted with the Wall—spraying, marking, touching, decorating or disfiguring it. The Wall in the East was regularly whitewashed and guarded and interaction with it was illegal and near impossible. Thus no matter how artistic, insightful or humorous the Gallery’s paintings may be, missing is the “authenticity” of the paintings in the West. Lacking the dynamic, and most of all the protest and the reason of the protest: the terror of the Wall was gone.16

Deficient of “authenticity” the East Side Gallery sought to identify with the political mood—peace, environment, and tolerance—in East Berlin at the time to create an East German production. Now, the East Germans too have a painted Wall. That notion may give purpose to its billing as “International Memorial for Freedom at the Berlin Wall,” yet historical memory is obfuscated here for there was neither painting nor freedom on that side of the Wall.

Already in 1990 the argument was put forth that “a few meters of Wall should remain standing” to “forever admonish that a people may never again be arbitrarily divided.” Here is the other side of the coin: Wall segments stand as symbol of unity, not of the free world as Kennedy and Reagan expressed, rather of a people that refused to remain divided. Such sentiments echo phrases of the past, of one Volk—one people—and while finding resonance among some Germans are taboo and part of the politics of memory.

Finally, consider that after the Wall fell the 9th November was suggested as a national holiday until the burden of that date came to light—the Kaiser’s birthday, Hitler’s Putsch, Kristallnacht, the night synagogues burned—and the historical lesions were too evident; instead, the day of unification was chosen, 3rd October.

Lacking historical authenticity but acknowledged as part and symbol of divided Europe during the Cold War, the Berlin Wall relics, caught in the politics of memory, expressing historical lessons and lesions, stand witness of the Wall’s victims and remain entangled in the web of German history.

End notes

Ernst Luuk, ed., Outlook Berlin (Berlin Information Centre; Berlin, 1988) 40-43. See also Luuk, ed., Ost-Berlin (Berlin Informationszentrum; Berlin, 1988) 32-35.

2 Winifried Fest and Heinz Fanselau, eds., Ost-Berlin (Berlin Informationszentrum; Berlin, 1984) 25-27.

3 Dietmar Schultke, Keiner Kommt Durch. Die Gesichte der innnerdeutschen Grenze 1945-1990 (Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag; Berlin, 1999) 52-72.

4 Alexandra Hildebrandt, The Wall, Figures, Facts (Verlag Haus am Checkpoint Charlie; Berlin, 2002) 75. See also www. berliner-mauer-dokumentationszentrum.de/de/dokz-mauertote_zahlen.html.

5 Werner Sikorski and Rainer Laabs, Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall (Ullstein Buchverlage; Berlin, 1998) 116.

6 Ibid.58-62. See also Rainer Hildebrandt, Berlin von der Frontstadt zur Bruecke Europas (Verlag Haus am Checkpoint Charlie; Berlin, 1984) 91.

7 Alios Riegl’s Der Moderne Denkmalkult (1903) translated by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo as “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982) 21-50.

7 See www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/kennedy.html.

8 See www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/wall.asp.

9 See this writer’s “Berlin Wall Art: Aestheticized Terror,” Lo Straniero 40. See also Auction Catalog, “Vente Aux Encheres A Monte-Carlo, Samedi 23 Juin 1990.

10 Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt, The Berlin Wall Today (Huess-Medien; Berlin, 1999) 68.

11 Ibid. 142.

12 See www.berlin.de “Gesamtkonzept Berliner Mauer.” See International Herald Tribune, 22 June 2006, “Plan to Commemorate Wall’s History is Unveiled.” See also www.berlinerumschau.de “Berliner Umschau: Der Berliner Senat verabschiedete sein Mauer-Gedenkkonzept.”

!3 Richard Bernstein, “Berlin Wall Memorial causes consternation,” International Herald Tribune, 27 December 2004.

14 Feversham and Schmidt, 178-179.

15 See Berlin Senate’s “Gesamtkonzept.”

16 See this writer’s “Berlin Wall Art: Aestheticized Terror,” Lo Straniero 40.

Vienna, April 2006 - Part II

Vienna, April 2006 - Part II

Vienna, April 2006 - Part I

Vienna, April 2006 - Part I