Berlin Wall: Destruction and Preservation
4th International Conference on History, Athens Greece
The Wall and Early Memorials
Constructed in the heat of summer’s night 13 August 1961, the Berlin Wall divided the city more than 28 years, 346 months, or 10, 531 days, and fell on a brisk autumn’s eve 9 November 1989. Foremost Berliners, but also most of the world celebrated the dismantling of one of the most visual, negative symbols of the Cold War.
The Wall had encircled the western sectors of Berlin with a 166 kilometers border of which 43 kilometers of fortification webbed through the city’s center, blocking the urban arteries of a once vibrant world metropolis.
The Wall’s divide in Berlin center was at least fifty meters in width consisting of one hinterland wall of concrete panels to the east, electrical contact fences with alarms, observation towers every one hundred meters, protective bunkers, warning devices, trip wires and spotlights, dog patrol tracks, convoy paths with regular vehicle patrols, automatic lighting systems, raked, sand control tracts and, finally, the western frontier wall of prefabricated cement segments topped with concrete pipe coverings—this complex of fortifications was known as the Berlin Wall.
What began with crude barbed wire and cement blocks was refined with four generations of Wall construction, modernized over the years with more advanced technology, culminating in the 1980s with the sophisticated “Wall 75 segments” that unintentionally produced the longest cement canvas in the world, quickly recognized by graffiti and wall painters, who in West Berlin diminished the Wall’s terror with their decorations.
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 fortified borders neither protecting the population within nor keeping outsiders out. Whereas West Berliners could travel freely, East Berliners were in an urban prison: Its citizens restricted in travel even in their own country, and spied upon by fellow citizens.
Despite this grim reality, the East German Wall builders argued that the Wall was an “anti-fascist rampart” protecting the proletariat within and preventing West German imperialism from sabotaging its mission of developing “real, existing socialism.” Since the Wall fortifications were directed eastward, the spoiler of “real, existing socialism” could only come from the citizens of East Germany, who, despite ideology and the Wall’s formidable barriers attempted to flee to the West. It is estimated that over 100,000 East Germans attempted escape to the West.[1]
From the Wall’s construction to shortly before its demise 4,975 East Germans breached the frontier of fortified West Berlin to receive welcome, shelter and resettlement in the West. Even Wall guardians fled with five hundred sixty East German border guards escaping to West Berlin.
Yet two hundred thirty-nine East Germans died attempting to cross to West Berlin, the last in April 1989, a mere six months before the Wall’s fall.[2]
With its first deaths, the frontier was labeled the “Wall of Shame” in the West and spontaneous markers—wreaths, flowers, or crosses—were planted in memory of the Wall’s victims. A few 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 Street where apartment blocks were on the east with street entrances to the west, East Berliners jumped out of windows before they were sealed. First flowers and wreaths and later white wooden crosses marked the spot where four escapees died in autumn 1961.
One of the most known early markers was a white 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 constructed and a street named after Fechter. Only in 1998 was the wooden cross removed; today a stele and stone tablet stand on the sidewalk of Zimmerstrasse in remembrance of the victim; however, the street no longer bears his name.[3]
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 citizens.
Alois Riegl, as early as 1903, distinguished between intentional and unintentional monuments.[4] The sites where escapees were killed by East German border guards and honored by West Berliners with markers were unintentional, spontaneous constructions, yet tolerated by urban planners for they documented injustice and gave public memory to the Wall’s 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 place of the victim’s death by the Wall, drew public notice and became predecessors of current memorials such as the official Bernauer Street Memorial.
Wall Destruction and Early Preservation
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. Already on 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. The East German “peaceful revolution” was in the making and new openings in the Wall were reported worldwide on a daily basis.
Since the Wall’s rupture, the East German government had opened border crossings and the populace had responded to the Wall with hammer and chisel, chipping and pecking morsels out of the cement edifice. The official dismantling of the Berlin Wall began in June 1990 and was completed by November 1990.[5] With wall peckers transforming the once impregnable construction into million fragments and East German border guards, in their new assignment, 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 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.[6]
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.” And 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.”[7]
With one official and several unofficial memorials of the Wall’s victims standing in West Berlin, the breach of the Wall added the new element of Wall conservation, one as aesthetic object, the other as object of horror, a 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 considered worthy to remain in parts as traces of the Cold War division, as markers of protest against its inhumanity and terror, and as fragmented sites of remembrance of its victims.
Ambivalent Wall Preservation, 1990-2005
With removal and destruction of the Berlin Wall, carried out with the same exemplar efficiency by East German border guards as their previous guardianship, little remained standing of the Wall by November 1990. And what did stand was threatened with removal by an energetic municipality that desired most of all to rebuild, modernize Berlin and eliminate the Wall, the most visible symbol of Germany’s division. Unification was in the air and Berlin Wall relics were perceived as bleak reminders of Germany’s partition and Cold War tensions.
In the 1990s Berlin became Europe’s largest construction site with cranes dominating the urban landscape of its historic center.
Potsdam Square is an example: A vacant lot for over four decades with the Wall dividing one of pre-war Berlin’s vibrant squares, the construction of prestigious international centers such as Mercedes Benz and Sony led to the rapid disappearance of the most visited and colorfully painted sections of the Berlin Wall. A private conservationist, who guarded a near dozen painted sections of the Wall in a small pocket of the square, was entangled in numerous litigation with the Berlin municipality, which planned construction of the Ministry of Environment on that site and insisted on the removal of the Wall segments.
Checkpoint Charlie, a global symbol of the super powers’ confrontation during the Cold War, was sold to the Central European Development Corporation, which declared insolvency several years later. Sections of the site now stand vacant, populated with vendors of kitsch in fly-by-night booths. Nothing remains of that internationally known border crossing, site of numerous films and escapes to the West; the city could not even save the Checkpoint Charlie watchtower from demolition by real estate developers in 2000.[8] Only the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, a private association, has kept a historical record of the Wall with its extensive collection.
In Berlin’s historic center from the Reichstag to the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdam Square to the Martin Gropius Museum, the most visited and internationally known section of the Berlin Wall, where wall artists skillfully decorated its concrete segments, nothing remains. Only on Potsdam Square a few painted Wall segments stand dislocated in front of international corporations as “colorful decorations.” And beyond the Gropius Museum the Niederkirchner Wall segments stand, pitifully neglected and severely damaged in proximity to the rubble of the Prince Albert Palace bombed at the end of World War II.
Throughout the nineties it was mostly the tenacity of private initiative rather than government interest that preserved Berlin Wall artifacts and kept the memory of the Wall alive. Their main support came from tourists who flocked to Berlin in persistent search of Berlin Wall relics.
Berlin’s new municipality was slow to react, despite the precedent that on 2 October 1990, the day before German unification, the East Berlin municipality in one of its last official acts placed Wall segments along Bernauer Street, Niederkirchner Street and the Invalid Cemetery under historical protection. As early as spring 1990, the German Historical Museum and the Museum of German History in conjunction with the Round-Table Berlin Center argued to preserve the Wall at Bernauer Street and to construct a memorial on that site.[9]
Consequently, the year after German unification the Berlin Senate resolved to create a Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Street. However, the political process was slow with a concourse announced for 1994, and the Senate approving the design of the architects Kohlhoff/Kohlhoff in 1995.
The Wall Memorial at the Bernauer Street was inaugurated on 13 August 1998, marking the thirty-seventh year of the Wall’s construction and almost ten years after its fall. Facing the Memorial a “Documentation Center” holding an extensive archive of books, films, photographs and witness accounts of the Wall’s history opened the following year.
Bernauer Street Memorial
With 210 frontline Wall segments still standing at Bernauer Street, the architects Kohlhass/Kohlhass designed a “reflective memorial,” or reflektierte Gedaenkstaette, where form accents reflection of the past, rather than representation or “historical authenticity.”
Embracing a 200 meters section of front line and hinterland Wall separated by the fifty meters stretch of control and death strips, where a watchtower stands, this historical ensemble is contained on its northern side by a thick, iron plate—a symbolic Iron Curtain—that cuts through the entire fifty meters connecting frontline with hinterland Wall, completing the Memorial.
Visitors are directed to the space in front of the hinterland Wall—that would be former East Germany—and by looking through narrow, chiseled slits in the Wall’s concrete have limited view of the control and death strips, the barriers and watchtower and beyond the frontline Wall, the West beckoning freedom.
During the Wall’s reign visitors stood on platforms in the West, at Potsdam Square for example, surveying the formable barrier’s division. At the Bernauer Memorial visitors are now on the eastern side of the Wall, peeking through (designed) Wall gashes to glimpse the barriers that blocked freedom on the other side.
With this design, the Memorial seeks to elicit “reflected memory,” soliciting visitors to “uncover” history while appealing to their “thoughtful reflection” of a past that confronted an East German escapee risking life to obtain freedom in the West.
Yet not everyone visiting the site draws such a conclusion.
As late as April 2005, the chairman of the “Union of Victims’ Associations of Communist Despotism,” Mr. Strunz, demanded, “The current, official Memorial Bernauer Street, the master work of a star architect, must disappear.” His objection is based on what he cites as the “misleading questions of well-intentioned visitors,” which frequently asked, “Why did East Germany use an iron plate here rather than cement?” Or “Were there also escape attempts over this Wall?”[10] This “reflective memorial” aroused controversy with visitors apparently expecting “historical authenticity,” rather than symbolic references.
Likewise controversial yet less ambiguous was the inscription on the iron plate, dated 13 August 1998
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
The dedication unleashed fierce public debate prompting the municipal government’s revision with the following formulation: “And in Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Despotism.”[11]
With the addition pasted over the original, another debate ensued resulting in the placement of a new iron plate with the engraving that “Communist Despotism” was indeed responsible for the deaths along the Wall.
Niederkirchner Street Memorial
The other site the East German municipality designed for historical protection on 2 October 1990 was the Niederkirchner Street with its 200 meters Wall segments, one of three sites with this length of Wall still standing.
With Wall segments badly damaged, pecked down to the metal girders inside the cement, the remains are now encased in a wire fence to prevent further destruction, producing the eerie appearance of a fenced-in wall.
Bordering the Niederkirchner Wall stands the “Topography of Terror,” opened in 1987 with the city’s celebration of its 750 years history. Excavated by students and concerned citizens in protest of the “forgotten history” of the Nazi era, the bombed Prince Albert Palace, reduced to its cellar, was headquarter of the Gestapo and the SS, the organizational center of the genocide against Jews, Gypsies, Gays and political and religious “undesirables.”
Across the Niederkirchner Wall to the east sits the former “Air Ministry” of Hermann Goering from where the Air Blitz against London was carried out. The Ministry survived Allied bombings and was occupied by the East German government with its Council of Ministries; today the federal government houses its Ministry of Finance in the renovated structure. Regardless of its function under two post-war German governments, one communist, the other democratic, the building’s minimal neo-classical style, favored by Hitler and Mussolini, links it to the architectural forms of the fascist period.[12]
The Niederkirchner Wall Memorial bounded by its neighboring sites stands in a negative confluence of German history, where the convergence of the past will require a strong measure of historical reflection, suitable for a “reflektierte Gedenkstaette (reflected memorial).[13]
The East Side Gallery Memorial
Recognized as official Wall Memorial by the Berlin Senate as early as 1991, the East Side Gallery stands as historical anomaly, for its public recognition emerged after the fall of the Wall.
From May to October 1990 as the Wall came tumbling down, 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 East Berlin consisted of inferior cement segments typical of the hinterland construction, but this site, where official visitors of state traveled from the airport to the city center, was constructed with the same superior “Wall 75 segments” that were used for the frontier Wall facing West Berlin. As a result a smooth Wall surface allowed artists to paint the Wall during this transition period when East Germany was absorbed by West Germany. The East Side Gallery Wall paintings capture in part the public mood of that time, referred to as “die Wendezeit,” or “the time of the turn.”[14]
Checkpoint Charlie Museum: Historical Site
The “Haus am Checkpoint Charlie” or Checkpoint Charlie Museum was founded in 1963 by Rainer Hildebrandt, a human rights activist, who collected artifacts of escapes from East to West Germany, supported escape assistance and advocated non-violence. He created the association “Working Group 13 August” (“Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13 August,”) that participated in the administration of the Museum, researched border incidents, published data and collected artifacts relevant to the Wall’s history.
Rainer Hildebrandt became a legend in Berlin with his many undertakings exposing the violence of East German despotism and the terror of the Wall. He wrote books, initiated art exhibits and sponsored collegiums and lectures, bringing greater awareness to an international public of the suffering inflicted by the Wall and human determination to seek freedom.
The Checkpoint Charlie Museum, privately financed, holds an extensive collection of material that was used by East Germans to escape to the West, from hot air balloons to modified automobiles that concealed passengers, from home-made one-man submarines to fake American uniforms, all ingenious creations of those who sought freedom. Hundreds of photographs of tunnel escapes, border incidents, shootings of escapees and successful flights to the West are displayed throughout the Museum’s rooms, documenting East German terror at the Berlin Wall and the German-German border.
On exhibit are also documents of human rights abuses and the worldwide, non-violent struggle against oppression.
Located at Checkpoint Charlie, the Museum has received international recognition like no other in Berlin.
Here on 22 October 1961East German border guards prevented US military personnel entry to East Berlin in violation of the Four Power Agreements on the status of Berlin. A four-day crisis with US and Soviet tanks massed in a standoff at the Checkpoint brought the super powers to the brink of a world war. Only when the Soviets stood down and US military permitted access to East Berlin did the crisis end. Other incidents of East German border guards shooting at an escapee in front of Checkpoint Charlie in 1973, and the following year the killing of one in front of Allied military personnel brought condemnation but not international crisis. A mere hundred meters away, Peter Fechter was killed.
Checkpoint Charlie was the site visited by more foreign dignitaries—from Kennedy to Khrushchev, Reagan to Gorbachev—than any other; only Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate has drawn similar world attention.[15]
Thus, in a symbolic closure to the Cold War and a festive ceremony on 22 June 1990, the foreign ministers of the four victorious powers of WWII attended the dismantling of the Checkpoint Charlie control shack that had stood across from the Museum in the middle of Friedrich Street.
From 25 August 1961 until the fall of the Wall, the US Checkpoint shack, manned as well by British and French military from 1962, was one of the seven crossings that served only non-Germans, diplomats and Allied military to cross to East Berlin. The remaining six crossings were for German nationals.
Given that historical background, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum stood out as natural site for remembrance of the Berlin Wall if only the “politics of memory” had not intervened.
Wall Preservation and Politics of Memory
Checkpoint Charlie Museum’s “Freedom Memorial” with its sensational international success in November 2004 ignited polemics and debates in the Cultural Ministry leading to work on an “all-encompassing plan,” or the Gesamtkonzept, to preserve remains of the Berlin Wall and to take initiative, after years of neglect, in furthering Berlin Wall Memorials. The Gesamtkonzept authors frankly acknowledge that “the (Checkpoint Charlie) installation opened the question of the objective relationship of ‘authentic site,’ information, documentation and memory” of the Wall.[16]
Checkpoint Charlie Museum: Insider as Outsider
With the death of Rainer Hildebrandt his widow Alexandra directed the Museum and on the 15th anniversary of the Wall’s fall (9 November 2004), opened “The Freedom Memorial on Checkpoint Charlie Square” on an adjacent site—previously occupied with vendors of Wall kitsch—that attracted international attention, drew thousands of visitors per week, but irked the Berlin municipality. The “Freedom Memorial” honored the memory of 1065 victims of the “GDR border regime and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the SED” with an installation of that many crosses and a reconstruction of more than 100 meters of the Wall. In less than a month visits by thousands of Germans and international sightseers brought the “Freedom Memorial”to the attention of the international press and thousands more flocked to the installation.[17]
Dr. Thomas Flierl, Berlin’s Cultural Minister, condemned the Museum’s project as the “wrong memorial at the wrong site.” And Mr. Donnermeyer, spokesman for Berlin Mayor Wowereit, said, “The city of Berlin has its own concept of how to remember the victims of the wall. Our concept is scientifically correct, whereas Mrs. Hildebrandt’s memorial is just a private initiative and historically incorrect.” Mr. Donnermeyer further described the memorial as “charlatanry” and said the display “suggests in the way it is arranged that people were shot at Checkpoint Charlie, which was never the case.”[18]
Consider the historical background: In 1990 the Senate of Berlin in a mood of capitalist euphoria under Mayor Mompert, later a real estate developer, sold the Checkpoint Charlie site to the Central European Development Corporation which pledged to erect a monument but declared insolvency several years later. The site was taken over by the BAG, a real estate investment conglomerate that so far has expressed more interest in profit than history. The BAG leased the site to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum for one year at 20,000 euros a month in 2004; and the Museum invested half a million euros to erect the “Freedom Memorial.” Forced to evacuate the site at the end of the lease, the Museum appealed in vain for a reprieve. It was given the option to purchase the site for 45 million dollars, a steep sum, and one the Museum could not meet. Thus it was forced to evacuate by the 4th July 2005 with the task of dismantling the site in advance. The Berlin municipality turned to its chief bailiff to enforce the mandate with slight modification once the municipality understood that the “4th July was the American Day of Independence” and Americans, after all, were proud of Checkpoint Charlie, which stood as symbol of their defense of West Berlin during the Cold War.[19]
Nevertheless, on 5th July 2005 the site was evacuated and the “Freedom Memorial” removed; yet it has remained in the minds of many who supported or opposed it.
Despite Mr. Donnermeyer’s historical lapse, for deaths did occur at and near Checkpoint Charlie, the subtext of his message reads that only the Berlin municipality, not a private association, had the “scientific” and “historical” expertise to construct Wall memorials in Berlin.
That political opinion advanced the Cultural Ministry’s work on the “Gesamtkonzept,” the “Total (or All-Encompassing) Concept for Remembrance of the Berlin Wall: Documentation, Information and Memory” which was debated and approved by the Berlin Senate, with distribution to the public on 12 July 2006.[20]
“Gesamtkonzept” as Plan of Berlin Wall History
With more than one hundred sites still standing relative to the Wall’s history and at least eighteen distinctive remains in place, a decentralized “memory landscape” of the Wall is visible throughout Berlin. [21]
Choosing the Bernauer Street site as center for extensive development in the Gesamtkonzept, the Cultural Ministry’s research team proposed information links to the Brandenburg Gate Metro Station and to seven sites scattered around the city. For Checkpoint Charlie, the team envisioned a “Museum of the Cold War” that would communicate the role of this particular site and the city in the global politics of the superpowers. A “border topography” adding to the current double pavement stones marking sporadically the route of the Wall would receive expansion with walkways and bike trails to further identify its location; and the project “Historical Mile Berlin Wall” would permit information boards in the languages of the former Allies and in German to remember certain events that transpired at various sites.[22]
Rejecting a “Hollywood-type” remake of the Wall as “theme park,” the Ministry’s research team agreed to conserve the remaining Wall relics, respect their decentralized locations, and transform Bernauer Street into exclusive monument, where an information pavilion would be added with an exhibit on the “phantom metro stations,” more Wall sections farther along Bernauer Street included and a “Wall Park” proposed in the expanded area along Brunner Street. The site shall serve as well as cenotaph in remembrance to the Wall’s victims.
The Brandenburg Gate site, selected by the German Parliament for its tourist recognition and identification with the Wall, shall serve as information center in the new metro passages opening in 2007.
Funding of the Gesamtkonzept was marked for 37.5 million euros with circa 31 million set-aside for Brenauer Street, 2.75 million for the Berlin Wall route, 1.35 million for the East Side Gallery, 570,000 for Brandenburg Gate and the remaining sum for the other sites selected. For the Checkpoint Charlie “Museum of the Cold War” project funding from the private sector was expected.[23]
Realpolitik and Wall History
Consisting of historians from two associations specializing in former East Germany, the Ministry’s research team had ample expertise to formulate the Gesamtkonzept. Yet it can be argued that the apparent and veiled polemic against and criticism of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum mars the “objectivity” claimed by the research team. That discussions between the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and the newly created Cultural Ministry’s research team was lacking is evident from the CDU, the opposition party, comment in the Gesamtkonzept requesting that “better coordination between public and private initiatives” be established. However, that appeared unlikely given the Ministry’s research team held that Checkpoint Charlie Museum “clearly competes” with the Bernauer Street Documentation Center. [24]With the lion’s share of the funding now available for development, Bernauer Street might become what the Cultural Ministry avidly wished--the tourist attraction that the Charlie Museum enjoys with its more than 700,000 annual visitors. In addition, the research team’s proposal of a “Museum of the Cold War” at Checkpoint Charlie once realized would stand in stark competition to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and certainly influence its visitor attendance and financial survival.
Berlin’s current government is a leftist coalition of SPD, the socialist party of former West Germany, and the PDS, the successor to the former East German SED or monolithic communist party. The Cultural Minister, Dr. Flierl, is a member of the PDS, and a critic of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. For the Cultural Ministry, and as argued in the Gesamtkonzept, the Bernauer Street remains the central and “authentic” site for remembrance of the Wall, whereas the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, supported by the conservative opposition, the CDU, is perceived by the Cultural Minister as “the wrong place” and taken as tourist attraction and private enterprise seeking profit, or as site that served foreigners, not Germans.
East Side Gallery: Outsider as Insider
The Gesamtkonzept marks a good part of funding for the East Side Gallery, a stretch of painted Wall that was placed under preservation by the city in 1991. After restoration of the badly deteriorated Wall paintings at the cost of over one million euros, the site shall be developed into a tourist and entertainment area with boat dock, restaurant, information center and park grounds along the riverside.[25]
Recognizing that the Gallery’s Wall paintings were derived from West Berlin Wall paintings, the research team argued that the “aesthetics and iconography are contemporary documents of the historical transformations in East Berlin” after the Wall’s rupture.[26]
Yet an argument can be made that the East Side Gallery 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 where Berliners freely interacted with the Wall—spraying, marking, touching, decorating or disfiguring it. The Wall in the East was regularly whitewashed and guarded; any interaction with it was forbidden, taboo or near impossible.[27]
Six months after the Wall fell in the political turbulence of May to October 1990--when East Germany acquiesced to disappear and West Germany to assimilate it--the East Side Gallery appeared. Christine McLean, a Scot, who obtained permission from the East German authorities to use 1.3 kilometers of the Wall, conceived the Gallery, inviting more than one hundred artists from around the world to paint the “government liberated” Wall segments.
Artists like Thierry Noire, who had painted the Wall in West Berlin participated, but most artists—from Cuba, Russia, and the USA—were in Berlin for the first time. No matter how artistic, insightful or humorous the paintings may be, missing is the “authenticity” of Wall paintings. Lacking is the dynamic, most of all the protest and the reason of the protest for the West Berlin Wall paintings, the terror of the Wall was gone.
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. Yet the Gallery’s current billing as “International Memorial for Freedom at the Berlin Wall” rewrites history for there was neither painting nor freedom on that side of the Wall.[28]
Niederkirchner Street Memorial: Retouching the “Authentic”
Given the emphasis on “historical authenticity” in the Gesamtkonzept, the extensive repair necessary to restore the Niederkirchner Street Memorial may well challenge the notion of “authenticity” in the preservation of historical sites and comprise the research team’s distain of “remaking” the Wall.
For guardians of historical sites, the key issue is that of authenticity. At an international conference on conservation, discussants selected the following criteria for evaluation of historical sites: authenticity of form, material, technique, function and site.[29] Taking that measurement, all remaining 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, when the Wall was breached. Destruction by natural elements and wall peckers have dramatically altered the form of Wall segments; in addition, material has been transformed with Wall segments cemented over to cover damage inflicted; finally, select Wall segments have been moved from original sites and relocated, serving as decorations at Potsdam Square, for example, or as artifacts in the Berlin Historical Museum or in Checkpoint Charlie Museum.
Requiring major restoration, the Niederkirchner Street Memorial has only one measure of authenticity: its location. And its location may have been the cause of its survival, standing next to the “Topography of Terror” and the forlorn rubble of the Prince Albert Palace. Yet its position between two notorious Nazi “landmarks” at the corner of the former “Wilhelmstrasse,” the Third Reich’s “heart of darkness,” will certainly cast a historical shadow over its presence, and perhaps challenging it as the “wrong memorial at the wrong site.”
Closing Remark
Given all the obstacles to rebuild unified Berlin, the city’s plan for Berlin Wall Memorials is a constructive effort in confronting its history. Yet the burden of Berlin’s history has weighted heavily on the Cultural Ministry, for its Gesamtkonzept has indeed applied “law” to write history. Despite this “official” version of “history,” the question of debating the problematic of remembering the Berlin Wall and its victims remains an open issue as opinions in journals and on the Internet attest.[30]
[1] Eckart D. Stratenschulte, East Berlin (Informationszentrum Berlin; Berlin, 1988) 60-61. See also Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt, The Berlin Wall Today (Huess-Medien; Berlin, 1999) 34.
[2] Ibid. See also Alexandra Hildebrandt, The Wall, Figures, Facts (Verlag Haus am Checkpoint Charlie; Berlin, 2002) 75. The death figures are challenged: See the Gesamtkonzept on www. berlin. de/berlinermauer.
[3] Werner Sikorski and Rainer Laabs, Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall (Ullstein Buchverlage; Berlin, 1998) 58-62.
[4] Alois Riegl, Der Moderne Denkmalkultus (1903), translated by Kurt. W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo as “The Modern Cult of Monuments: It Character and Its Origins,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982) 21-50.
[5] Feversham and Schmidt, p. 65.
[6] Auction Catalog,“Vente Aux Encheres A Monte-Carlo,” Samedi 23 Juin 1990. See also the writer’s “Berlin Wall Art: Aestheticized Terror,” Lo Straniero, 40.
[7] Feversham and Schmidt, 68.
[8] See Gesamtkonzept, .8.
[9]Gesamtkonzept, 6.
[10]Mr. Harald Strunz’s letter of 18 April 2005 is posted on www.berlin.de/berlinermauer.
[11] Feversham and Schmidt,178-179.
[12] Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (The University of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1997) 160, 214.
[13] The “historical levels” of Niederkirchnerstrasse are recognized by the authors of the Gesamtkonzept, see 47-48.
[14] See website, www. eastsidegallery.com.
[15] See website, www. checkpoint charlie. de
[16] See Gessamtkonzept, 13.
[17] Richard Bernstein, “Berlin Wall memorial causes consternation,” International Herald Tribune, 27 December 2004, 3.
[18] Tom Goeller, “Berlin Wall memorial to be razed,” The Washington Times, 27 June 2005.
[19] See website checkpoint charlie. de.,143rd Press Conference, 17.
[20] See website berlin. de/berlinermauer/gesamtkonzept.
[21] Feversham and Schmidt, p.70-94, and Gesamtkonzept, 16.
[22] “Historical Mile Berlin Wall” was forwarded by the historical association “Forum for History and Present,” a member of the Gesamtkonzept research team. The project received the second highest funding with 2.75 million euros to complete the project.
[23] Gesamtkonzept, 62-65.
[24] Gesamtkonzept, 8. The authors of the Gesamtkonzept anticipated “competition” to the Bernauer Street Memorial from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum as well as from the project “Brandenburg Gate Memorial,” chosen by the German Parliament for its name recognition as the most known international landmark in Berlin after Checkpoint Charlie. To prevent “competition” the research team proposed a mere “information site” at the Brandenburg Gate, one that would direct visitors to the Bernauer Street Memorial. See 38-41, Gesamtkonzept.
[25] Gesamtkonzept authors’ concern of the creation of a Berlin Wall “theme park” apparently does not apply to the East Side Gallery.
[26] Gesamtkonzept, 47-48.
[27] See the writer’s “Berlin Wall Art: Aestheticized Terror,” Lo Straniero,40.
[28] See website, www. eastsidegallery.com.
[29] Feversham and Schmidt, 70.
[30] On berlin.de/berlinermauer critics still request Checkpoint Charlie receive more recognition than the municipality has so far bestowed. Perhaps EU spokeswoman, Krisztina Nagy, commenting on other legislation has a point when she stated, “It is not up to law to write history. Historians need to have a debate.” See International Herald Tribune, 12 October 2006, 1.
