Berlin Wall Memorials: The Politics of Memory
29th IMISE Conference, Paris, France.
Chair of Panel on “History And Law.”
Wall Construction
In the heat of a summer’s night on 13 August 1961, the East German government, under Walter Ulbricht, enclosed West Berlin with barbed wire, cement blocks, soldiers, worker’s brigades and light armored vehicles. 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 of urban mobility lasted over 28 years, ending on 9 November 1989. What began with crude cement blocks and barbed wire would be refined over the years with four generations of Wall construction, producing “the Modern Border” in East German parlance, a demarcation of brutal sophistication upholding its guardian’s motto of “No one shall get through.”
During 28 years West Berlin was sealed-in with a 166 kilometers belt of Wall, of which 48 kilometers ran through the center of the city. Whereas East Germany built 5 kilometers “forbidden zones” on its frontier with West Germany, the divide in Berlin’s center was, for the most, at least 50 meters in width. The inter-city frontier from East to West consisted of concrete Wall 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 vehicle patrols, line markings for border guards, indicating their westward limit, deep trenches for vehicles, automatic lighting systems, raked, sandy control tracts and finally the western Wall segments with pipe coverings. In reality, there was far more than a Wall that separated East from West Berlin: there was a wall fortification, one that was modernized over the years with more advanced technology.
The East German builders argued that the Wall was “an anti-fascist rampart” to protect the proletariat and to prevent the West German imperialists from sabotaging their mission of building “real, existing socialism.”
However, since the Wall’s fortifications were directed to the east, the intended spoiler of “real, existing socialism” could only come from the citizens of East Germany, who despite the propaganda and the Wall sought to flee to the West.
Between the Wall’s construction and 1987, 39,000 East Germans escaped through the fortified frontier, and 4,975 of the escapees breached the Wall to West Berlin. About 2,500 of those who fled were East German border troops or military with 560 escaping to West Berlin.
And nearly 200 met their death at the East German frontier; 79 in Berlin alone with the last a mere six months before the Wall fell.
Wall Markings
Since its construction, West Berliners have left markers on or near the Wall. In memory of the Wall’s victims, flowers, wreaths, crosses were planted; the names and dates of the dead or unknown victims noted in remembrance and acknowledgment of the Wall’s brutality and terror.
One of the more tragic and most known markers was a wooden cross in memory of the death of Peter Fechter. Just 18 years old, Peter Fechter attempted to flee with his friend Helmut Kulbeik on 17 August 1962; whereas his friend scaled the Wall successfully near Checkpoint Charlie, East German border guards shot Peter Fechter twice in the back and abdomen, letting him painfully bleed to death by neither giving medical aid nor permitting West Berlin police from doing so. In memory of Peter Fechtner’s unnecessary death, a wooden cross was erected on the western side of the Wall. Only in 1998 was the cross removed when urban development took precedence over historical memory; today a bronze column stands on the sidewalk of Zimmerstrasse in rembramce of the young victim, yet the street no longer bears his name.
By walking south of the Reichstag, the German parliament, toward the Brandenburg Gate on the side of the wooded Tiergarten a short wire fence displays more than half a dozen white crosses, each bearing the name with date of death of a Wall victim. A brief inscription informs the reader that this memorial will soon have a permanent place east of the Reichstag near the Spree River, where it originally stood before renovations of this government area began.
These spontaneous and unofficial markings were the first memorials in remembrance of the Wall’s victims as well as statements against the brutal force used by East German border guards to maintain the communist state.
Over a hundred years ago, the scholar Alois Riegl distinguished between intentional and unintentional monuments. Considering that difference, the original places where East German refugees were killed and remembered by West Berliners with markers were unintentional monuments, whereas the current memorials are intentional monuments.
By extension of Riegl’s argument, the Berlin Wall with its complex border fortifications was itself an unintentional monument that became an intentional one. In the East it stood as an unintentional monument: the anti-fascist rampart in defense of communism and protection of the state. In Western perception the Wall stood as an unintentional monument representing the hard politics of the Cold War and the force resorted to by the East German government to maintain a failing state. As such, the Wall became West Berlin’s first tourist attraction, drawing 4 million visitors annually and was given the popular name of “the eight wonder of the world,” despite the brutal force, the tragic deaths and the unhappy memories associated with its menacing existence in the heart of a major city.
The Berlin Wall became an intentional monument when it lost its functionality and menace, when it was breached and ruptured.
Wall Rupture
With the breach of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the general response of the Berlin populace was to remove the Wall as quickly as possible. Already on 10 November, the once menacing Wall was perceived with new eyes as thousands of people occupied it, 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. Just before Christmas that year, the symbolic Brandenbur Gate was opened and the New Year’s festivities held there with fireworks and mass celebrations. Even Leonard Bernstein arrived in West Berlin to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, honoring the fall of the Wall. Everyone understood that with the Wall’s demise and the collapse of the East German state, the unification of Germany was on the political agenda.
After the first democratic elections in East Germany and the introduction of the West German currency, the official dismantling of the Wall began in June 1990. Yet since the Wall’s breach, the populace had responded with hammer and chisel, chipping and pecking morsels out of the Wall. With wall peckers transforming the Wall into million fragments and East German border guards now removing segments for recycling into road gravel, the more decorative, painted wall pieces 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 the Galerie Park Palace in Monaco for about 1.3 million DM or about 650,000 euros.
This was the time that the East German Conservator General began designating “historic pieces” of the Wall for preservation as “historic monuments.” And Hagen Koch, former Stasi, attached the first protection signs on Wall segments, which were simply ignored by the active wall peckers collecting colorful souvenirs. In the West, Willy Brandt, major of West Berlin when the Wall was built and former chancellor of West Germany, expressed the view “…a bit, just a bit of this revolting edifice might be left standing to help remember a historical monstrosity.”
Despite the Berlin Wall’s cause of human unhappiness, grief, illness, death and burden of negative memories, it was deemed too historically significant to disappear completely.
Wall Remains
Today at least 18 scattered sections of the Wall remain standing in Berlin. Some are neglected, little known fragments in the side streets of Berlin, or a Wall tower here, a hinterland Wall section there; others are more recognized official memorials in prestige locations. The sections of the Berlin Wall retained today, if not all official memorials, are intentional monuments and in one way or another traces of the past, standing witness of an ignoble history fraught with painful memories. The Wall remains embrace the two German words for memorial: the one is “Denkmahl” or site for thought or reflection of a historical event, and the other is “Mahnmal” or site for admonishment and remembrance of negative human experiences considered worth conserving for future generations.
Besides the memorials near the Reichstag and in memory of Peter Fechter mentioned earlier, I would like to consider the following sites: the East Side Gallery, Checkpoint Charlie, the Niederkirchner Street Memorial and the Bernauer Street Memorial.
1. The East Side Gallery:
Between May and October 1990, several months before the Wall was dismantled, 118 artists from 21 countries participated in painting over one kilometer of Wall segments to create the “East Side Gallery.” The Gallery stands in Friedrichshain, former district of East Berlin, on Muehlen and Holzmarktstrasse and thus would normally have had inferior cement segments as raw material, typical of the hinterland Wall facing east. However, the Muehlen and Holzmarktstrasse were part of the official East German government’s route from Schoenefeld Airport to the center of East Berlin and to impress state visitors received 1.3 kilometers of border Wall 75, typically used for the frontline Wall facing West Berlin. The installation of border Wall 75 segments here permitted artists in 1990 to paint an image on a smooth surface. Previously untouchable to East Germans, the Berlin Wall facing east received at this site a colorful, artistic façade common on the western side, yet novel and radical in Friedrichshain before German unification. Indeed, an artistic expression was realized here and a defiance to state power, reflecting the mood of 4 November 1989, when 1 million East Germans demonstrated in the center of the city informing the state that “we are the people.”
Possibly in recognition of that populist statement, in 1992, the municipal government of Berlin declared the East Side Gallery a permanent exhibit and it remains standing today, albeit the deteriorating condition of its Wall paintings. In 1995 Thiery Noir, who had painted the Wall in the West and thus participated in painting the Wall in the East, retouched his works for the Gallery along with other painters. A well-known repainting was the “Fraternal Kiss” of Honecker and Brezhnev in embrace by the Russian artist Dimitri Vrubel. While these “second originals” were accepted as restoration of the spontaneous art of 1990, the East Side Gallery is gradually loosing its battle against nature, city pollution, wall peckers and budget allocations of the city government. With millions of euros in estimated costs for restoration and nature’s continuing deterioration of the Wall paintings, the East Side Gallery may disappear in a few years. The East Side Gallery captured the public mood of the historical moment, and it may end like a happening, having expressed a collective experience, it may disappear from the urban archives of memorials.
2. Checkpoint Charlie:
Located on Friedrich Strasse on the border between Berlin Center, in the former Soviet Sector, and Berlin Kreuzberg in the US Sector, Checkpoint Charlie, from 1962 also manned by British and French military, became the focal point of the Cold War in Berlin. Charlie completed the US military checkpoints into the Soviet Zone and to West and East Berlin with Alpha at Helmstedt, West Germany, and Bravo at Dreilinden, the entry to West Berlin. From 25 August 1961 until the Wall collapsed, Checkpoint Charlie served non-Germans, diplomats and Allied military to cross into East Berlin. Germans had other border crossings, for example, at Heinrich-Heine Strasse.
Checkpoint Charlie is most known for a major Cold War incident that brought visions of atomic war. On 22 October 1961 East German border guards counter to Allied agreements prevented US military entry to East Berlin. That confrontation led to a three-day crisis with US and Soviet tanks in a stand off and the super powers on the brink of WWIII, until the US military was permitted to enter East Berlin. Two other incidents of East German border guards shooting at the Checkpoint to fell an escapee in 1973, and the following year deadly fire killing a refugee in front of the Allies.
In a festive ceremony, Checkpoint Charlie was dismantled on 22 June 1990, yet today a smaller version of the Checkpoint stands behind sandbags in the middle of Friedrich Strasse facing east. The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, a documentation center of human rights abuses and East German border incidents stands at the Checkpoint since 1963. Displaying devices used by East German escapees and documenting flight to the West, the Haus is the most visited site of Berlin Wall history with over half a million visitors a year. All that remains of the vast East German border complex is a westward watchtower.
3. Niederkirchnerstrasse
A 200 meter section of border Wall 75 runs along this street that served as Cold War border. Although the wall segments are badly damaged, pecked down to the metal girders inside the cement, the site is recognized as a official memorial. What remains of the Wall is now encased in a wire fence to prevent further destruction. Visitors here are often puzzled by the convergence of German history that is found at this side, for just in front of the Wall to the West stands the Topography of Terror, first opened in 1978 in celebration to Berlin’s 750 years. The Topography of Terror was excavated by students and intellectuals interested in revealing an aspect of neglected Berlin history, that of the Nazi past. The site is the former Prinz Albert Palais, the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS, from there the exterminations were carried out. Facing the Prince Albert Palais to the East is the former Air Ministry of Hermann Goering, from where the Air Blitz was carried out. And in between stands a section of the Berlin Wall, If any historical site in Berlin merits to remain as reminder of a negative collective memory, the Niederkirchnerstrasse ranks high.
4. Wall Memorial in Bernauer Strasse
Is located near the Nordbahnhof metro station in a relatively unknown area of the city center and former Soviet Sector. Here the Wall ran through a row of houses with the front thresholds in the West and the rest of the buildings in the East. In the early days of the Wall, people jumped out of the windows to reach the West; some escaped, some found their death; most of the escapes are held in news images, distributed globally, discrediting the Wall builders. Over 2000 residents were relocated and the buildings demolished. Also demolished here was the church of reconciliation, erected in 1894 and destroyed in 1985 to clear the death strip of the Wall where it was located; two cemeteries were violated here. And spontaneous unintentional memorials were placed here in memory of the victims. Given that history the city of Berlin designed Bernauer Strasse as an official memorial that opened on 13 August 1998. What makes this Memorial unique is that it not only holds 210 frontline Wall elements, it has a Wall Memorial at the site that was designed by the architects Kohlhass and Kohlhass of Frankfurt. In addition, a Documentation Center has been constructed and a sophisticated archive emerged with collections of photos, films, books and documents of the Wall’s history.
Kohlhass’s design of Memorial received much criticism in the press and from the public, and still remains controversial today. The design includes a 200 meters strip of front line wall segements and hinterland wall, a control tower, and the fifty meters space of the Wall’s death strip. That complex is truncated on the northern side by a large rusted iron wall that cuts through the death strip. For visitors to obtain an idea of what this site is all about, they are invited to peek through narrow slits in the hinterland Wall, giving them a view of the death strip, the control tower and the back of the front line Wall, beyond which freedom existed for the East German refugee. The large rusted iron wall symbolizes, most likely, the former Iron Curtain that divided Europe. On the outside of the Iron Wall there stands an inscription on 13 August 1998 read:
Berlin Wall Memorial
In Memory of the Division of the City
From 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989
And in Remembrance of the Victims
Erected by the
Federal Republic of Germany and by the Land of Berlin
That inscription unleashed a fierce public debate resulting in a textual revision with the new reading of “And in Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Despotism.” The new inscription was simple placed over the old.
That rewrite unleashing another debate about what “Communist Despotism?’ Finally a new iron wall was installed with the last description left standing.
Problematic of Memorials
Sixteen years after the fall of the Wall debates continue to this day of how to evaluate the remains of the Wall. Just as the public response from the 10th November 1989 was to tear down the Wall and remove it, today similar views are expressed questioning the Wall remains.
A key issue for conservationist, for example, is the one of authenticity. At a recent international conference on conservation of historical sites, discussants selected the following criteria: authenticity of form, material, technique, function and site. Taking that measurement, all the 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. Destruction by the elements and the wall peckers have changed the form of the Wall segments; and material has been transformed as well as certain sections have been cemented again to cover the damage caused by the wall peckers; finally, select Wall segments have been moved from their original sites and relocated to others, serving as decorations in the Potsdamer Platz, for example, or as historical evidence in the Berlin Historical Museum. Deprived of their authenticity are they still historical evidence of the past. If so, based on what criteria. Since the founding of monuments and memorials is a political is it not conceivable that a historical memory has too been founded
For example, an argument can be made that the East Side Gallery is an inversion of historical events: no paintings on the Wall were possible in East Berlin; that only happened in the West were Berliners freely interacted with the Wall—painting, spraying, marking, touching or decorating the Wall. Yet we should not belittle the tremendous East German desire for freedom that was expressed on 4 November and in subsequent days. That contributed the making of the East Side Gallery.
Some years ago Maurice Halbswachs introduced the concept of collective memory, which stands for the testimony of a group of people who have experienced the same history. Yet in considering the memory of Germans who lived to the East and those who lived to the West of the Berlin, Wall different experiences are recorded, for certainly they lived in two very different worlds.
More than one generation after the Wall of the fall certain East Germans express a longing for the Wall’s return—called ostalgie—and the society the Wall made possible, one of closed in security with full employment and cradle to grave security of life’s basic needs; and certain West Berliners express a longing for Wall City, the government subsidized life on the island of freedom in the sea of communism. A French writer, Kit Hillair regretted the loss of West Berlin’s subculture with its free music in cheap bars and clubs, removed from consumer society’s drive for expensive novelty.
What these longings share is the felt absence in the present of a time that held certain securities no longer possible in Berlin’s open and mobile society.
With unification the Germans expressed a bonding of East and West in a new nation. Given that momentum for unity, should Wall Memorials remain to remind Germans of their division, of the Iron Curtain and the division of Europe, of the Cold ideologies that divided the world into hostile camps, should all of that not enter the realm of oblivion
Where in Paris do we find remains of the Bastille—only a few fragments remain in the museum Carnavalet of that once despised ediface.
Yet in 1879, the third republic chose the fall of the Bastille as a national holiday, and it has remained in French memory to this day, celebrated annually.
The Berlin Wall like the Bastille in Paris shared the embodiment of negative collective memory. In their totality they were symbols of oppression, yet in their destruction they became fragments of liberation. As such I believe the remaining Wall segments should stand as symbols of humanity’s quest for freedom.
