Description: To my mind, it is one of history’s greatest ironies that the Berlin Wall, which for almost 30 years kept the inhabitants of East Berlin encaged under a brutal regime, is itself in so much danger that its most prominent sections have to be surrounded by barb wire to protect it them. Stripped down to a few graffitied sections as a result of the euphoric events of November 1989 when the wall quite literally fell to the hammers of angry citizens (subsequently aided by souvenir hunters), it requires a great deal of imagination to appreciate what it must have looked like when it stretched for 156 km to completely surround West Berlin. Its was originally built as a wire fence in 1961, which was subsequently strengthened and (between 1965 and 1975) turned into a concrete wall.
The wall encircled West Berlin not to keep its citizens out of East Germany (which they could visit with a visa), but to prevent East Germany’s citizens from entering West Germany, since once they entered West Berlin they were immediately eligible for West German citizenship and able to travel to the West. Before 1961, 3.5 million East Germans (over 20% of the country’s population) had escaped to West Germany by this method, in the following 28 years, just 5,000 managed to do so, including a number of border guards who defected. While statistics vary, historians believe that at least 100 East Germans died trying to cross the Wall. For obvious reasons, it’s unknown how many people attempted to get across the Wall but neither succeeded nor were killed. The Wall itself was located several meters into East German territory, anyone who managed to cross it still had to run across No-Man’s Land (also in East Germany) to get into West Germany.
Considering its iconic and fearsome history, I personally found the Wall to be visually underwhelming, which I suppose is a testament to how well Berlin has reintegrated. Seen in isolation the concrete slabs of the wall look unexceptional and they were much shorter and thinner than I had expected, although that’s cold comfort of court to the friend and loved ones of those who died trying to cross it. Much of what has been preserved survives because it became a popular template for graffiti artists in East German, a fitting combination of an authoritarian monument and a subversive art form. You can see some of best examples of this on a few sections scattered and reerected around Potsdamer Platz (see my separate entry), one of the commercial centers of modern Berlin (former located in the east) and at the so-called "East Side Gallery" near the old East Berlin Train Station (Ostbahnhof) on Mühlenstrasse where some of the best graffiti art from East Berlin is visible in a single place.
Ironically, I thought the most powerful section of the Wall to visit was the "Topography of Terror" ("Topographie des Terrors") memorial, which uses the wall as a backdrop for an outdoor museum with information on the Nazi seizure of power and that regime’s barbarity. Since it’s located below ground level and there’s an overhanging roof (to protect the exhibits from the elements) it physically creates a certain kind of claustrophobic and the graphic photographs and text leave little to the imagination. It’s a mistake to conflate Nazi and Communist atrocities, although the USSR and Nazi Germany were Allies at the beginning of the Second World War (and the USSR held on to the territory it conquered after the war), but authoritarian regimes share a desire for control, regardless of their politics. This juxtaposition also illustrates how the people of what was East Germany suffered under over half a century of authoritarian rule between 1933 and 1989.
For further information see www.berlin-wall.org
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