There's so much to be said about the Berlin Wall, it's impossible to do the prufundity of it justice. Imagine waking up one day to see a white line being painted down the middle of your road. It must have seemed like a bit of a joke, the Communists being a little over protective of their East German territory. Then imagine watching the white line becoming a barbed wire fence and then a wall. From wall, to death strip. The West was now an island in the East, surrounded by the Communist enemy. Families were cut off from one another, people lost jobs, property, friends, lovers. The East lost a means of escape to the West. The development from a white line that people walked over without thinking, to a wall that children played on during its construction, to an untouchable object that would command death for anyone who dared venture too close. Buildings were pulled down either side to create a no-man's land and the Wall itself became isolated, snaking its way through a deserted wasteland.
In Peter Schneider's Die Mauer Springer (The Wall Jumper), he comments on the significance of writing on the Wall. Walking home one night in Berlin the protaganist stops his friends and says 'they actually got five letters!...Doesn't that tell you anything?'(Schneider, p.73). People were always finding means to show the impunity of the Wall, to show that it was just stone. In the 1960s and 70s, the artist Allan Kaprow decided to build miniature replicas of the Wall ("Sweet Walls") in deserted areas of the city that people could climb on, dismantle etc. (Mesch, p.184). The point was to show that the Wall was not the problem it was politics that caused its impenitrability.Even today, post unification, the areas the Wall used to traverse are either nicely disguised by new housing and the reinstatement of old transport routes or tourist attractions, or new monuments to modernity such as Potsdamer Platz. Potsdamer Platz, which was once the centre of Berlin, now hosts the tallest skyskrapers in the city with an inobtusive bronze demarcation running through the centre of the square which states at regular intervals 'Berliner Mauer 1961-1989'. Clearly the impulse in a square dominated by skyscrapers is to look up, not down at your feet. |
At The East Side Gallery which snakes alongside the River Spree near Ostbahnhof, the largest stretch of the Wall still to remain, hosts various artworks by international artists. The idea being that now the Wall can be written and drawn on; it is no longer a grey foreboding city divider but a gaudy tourist attraction. The irony is that sections of the Wall itself has been rebuilt a few metres to the West of where it once stood. So even the museum piece itself is inauthenthic and somehow manages to negate the past in its reconstruction. It has lost something of the gravitas it once had and causes one to forget the many that died, and those that spend over 25 years staring and wishing it were not there. |
Mauer Park in the north of the city shows a reconstruction of the deathstrip and the Wall has been reconstructed as a series of iron piles driven in to the earth. One wonders how the residents feel about now having a view of a tourist attraction based on the thing they spent years wishing away. After the fall of the Wall (interestingly the Germans use a word to describe the fall that indicates a continous, rather than completed action), the person on the street could tell whether one was in East or West by the street lights; the ones in the East showing the famous Ampelmänner. But now these are spreading their way into the West, so popular are they with tourists. As such, the original boudaries of the Wall are become blurred and most probably deliberately distorted |
One wonders if the Wall was something that became a part of everyday life, that one didn't think about all that much. It must have been strange though to look out of your window across to the other side, or to be unable to walk down streets that were all of a sudden blocked off. I suppose as with anything anywhere, one gets used to the situation you are in. There is a phrase now, post reunification, that though the Wall is no longer a physical presence, Berliners and Germans still need to pull down the Wall in their heads. I guess that even if you weren't confronted with it's physical presence everyday, then the Wall would have become a subconscious element that you worked around without thinking. Thus, after reunification, Berliners had to re-route their lives and their way of thinking about the city and about Germany. A city divided for 28 years after such a traumatic event will take a long time to reunify in reality, even if it has happened physically and politically.
Schneider, Peter, The Wall Jumper, (London: Penguin Books, 2005).