Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?

"THERE ARE PLENTY OF GOOD REASONS TO ALSO NOT LOSE SIGHT OF THE 13TH AUGUST"1

REMEMBERING THE WALL SINCE 1990

Anna Kaminsky

"Some of you will have asked yourselves: Why has the Enquête Commission of the German Bundestag been campaigning so hard to remember the building of the Berlin Wall 35 years ago today? Is it not enough that the first Enquête Commission tried to analyse the event in several expert groups and hearings? Is the 17th June not an appropriate day to remember everything carried out by the SED dictatorship until its downfall in autumn 1989? I think there are plenty of good reasons also not to lose sight of the 13th August."2

FROM 9TH-13TH AUGUST

In 1996, in his welcome speech at a commemoration service in the Bundestag, Rainer Eppelmann used these words to justify the committee's decision to use the 35th anniversary of the building of the Wall as an opportunity to both remember and to dedicate a number of events to it. 18 years later, remembering the building of the Wall and life in a divided city and a divided world has not only been brought back to the forefront of the city's memory, the Wall and its construction now have a firm place in public discussion and collective memory. Moreover, in the 50th year after the Wall was built, remembering the building and the weeks leading up to it received greater attention by June 2011 in research and from the media than the uprisings of 17th June 1953.

The actual division of the city had been relegated to second place on the city's self-image agenda years ago, but the situation seemed to have changed by the 50th anniversary of the Building of the Wall. One sign of this was that the anniversary had pushed other events into the background of public discourse during the time leading up to it. Moreover, it became clear that the policy of eradicating the Wall in the first years after its fall had led to calls for a reconstruction of the Wall in order to "bring history to life"3, as former governing mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, requested.

Despite various ideas of how to keep the memory of the Wall and the division alive, it seems as though the city has found its way back to its traumatic history after 20 years. Forgotten are the first 15 years after the Fall of the Wall which were characterised by the attempts to completely eradicate all traces of the construction and the division of the city which lasted 28 years. Before this, commemorating the Wall had only been a topic for victim's associations, private societies and a few concerned citizens. Whilst public events mainly celebrated the Fall of the Wall, public attention only turned to the 13th of August by way of detour on the 9th of November. The happiness and euphoria brought on by the Fall of the Wall, coupled with the nostalgia of the 90s, seemed to change the general consensus about what exactly had fallen in 89: it was a dictatorship that had denied its citizens basic human rights and shot or imposed long prison sentences on all those who had tried to escape its sealed borders.

SO WHERE WAS THE WALL?

The images from the night of 9th-10th November are equally as iconic in world history as those from 12th-13th August 1961.

The crowds of people who stormed the opened border and the people sitting and dancing on the Wall are no less a part of cultural memory than the people standing in disbelief in front of the rolls of barbed wire, or those jumping from windows on Bernauer Straße who considered these dangerous jumps the only possibility to make it to the West and, ultimately to freedom.

Although it was by no means a forgone conclusion to SED rulers in the GDR that the Wall and the border were to remain open, deliberations were already being made on 10th November as to what should happen to this 'historical monstrosity'. Whilst Willy Brandt - then the reigning mayor of West Berlin - called for sections of the Wall to be preserved as a memorial in his speech in front of the Schöneberg City Hall, others were already thinking of turning the Wall into a business. And so, on 10th November 1989, the first enquiries were sent from Bayern to the GDR government offering cash in return for "unwanted pieces of your border fortifications no longer needed".4 On 14th November 1989, a business consultant got in touch with the GDR's Permanent Representation in Bonn and - since trade with the Wall could no longer be hindered - recommended that the GDR should think about any "conflicting nature", the consultant went on to say that "trade will be made with sections of the Wall, no matter where they come from. I consider it therefore all the more reasonable to make money from it."5

Almost overnight, the Wall became a highly sought-after object, a trophy of the Cold War, an export hit and a symbol. If, during its 29 years in existence, the Wall had simply been a symbol of the Socialist system's inhumanity and oppression, overnight, it had become a symbol of civil courage and the will for freedom. No other construction in Germany, and perhaps Europe, had had such grave consequences on so many people in the second half of the 20th century. No other construction from this period became a symbol of oppression and dictatorship, contempt for basic human rights and, finally, for taking hostage of millions of people by a regime formed on injustice. After the Fall of the Wall, no other construction went from being a symbol of oppression and contempt for mankind to a symbol of the will for freedom and civil courage.

In the weeks and months after the Wall fell, requests from all over the world for pieces of the Wall increased and on 7th December / 4th January 1990, the GDR government, under Hans Modrow, decided to sell it. It was hoped that selling the Wall would help save the GDR economy which was heading towards bankruptcy. With offers of up to 500,000 DM per section6, these hopes were warranted.

Since the political development by the end of 1989 had already shown that the SED regime could no longer be saved, and, furthermore, that not only the Berlin Wall, but the entire inner-German border had been opened, dismantling what was once the most heavily guarded border was at the top of the agenda.

It was immediately suggested that at least part of the costs of dismantling the fortifications should be financed by selling the Wall.

The GDR government launched an information campaign around Christmas 1989 to outline the reasons for the sale of the Berlin Wall to the angry and rattled people in the GDR. The campaign aimed to pick up the points made in the letters of complaint received by the government and justify the sale of the Wall to which the government saw no alternative.

Anger at the sale of the Wall was directed at the government who had locked in its citizens for decades, ruthlessly shot at escapees and who now wanted to sell this 'Wall of shame' - at which people had been murdered - in order to make money. The government used three arguments to justify selling the Wall to the western World:

1) The GDR's need foreign exchange,

2) the Wall is public property and, therefore

3) any profit made by the sale would go to the entire GDR population, and social projects, for example, would therefore benefit from such a sale. Irrespective of any further reservations about the sale of the Wall, the border troops in Mitte - whose job had been to protect the Wall and prevent anyone penetrating the border until December 19897 - began work on dismantling the Wall in January 1990. Work began on sections of the Wall which had been painted by Wall artists, and, therefore, were particularly lucrative. The majority of the concrete sections were crushed and used, amongst other things, for road and motorway construction.

In less than a year, that which had once separated the people along a 156 km long border and was made up of 54,000 concrete segments - each 2.6 tonnes in weight and 3.2 metres in height - had all but disappeared from the city landscape. Other objects from the border to disappear included hundreds of kilometres of barbed wire and strips of lighting, equipment used to harness guard dogs and 186 watch towers from which guards had shot live-ammunition.

The desire for the city to return to some sort of normality after the long years of division was quite understandable. In 1990, very few could have imagined that there would one day be calls for the city and its people to make their wound visible once more. Removing the Wall from the city completely seemed a suitable way to overcome the division and its consequences as quickly as possible.

It was not only visitors to Berlin, whose interest in the Wall was warranted, who were increasingly baffled and asking: "So, where was the Wall?" At the same time, people had to accept that the notion of what the Wall had meant for the city and its people had waned considerably.

THE CONFLICT SURROUNDING COMMEMORATING THE WALL

From very early on, some had voiced their opinion that the Wall should be preserved, at least in some areas of the city, as a memorial.

Willy Brandt was the Mayor of Berlin at the time and, on 10th...