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“GUERILLA REMEMBRANCE” AND VISIBLE COMMEMORATION

Anyone who had hoped that the Berlin Senate would work on making a memorial in the city (more) visible after the 40^th anniversary of the building of the Wall was to be disappointed. The memorial centre on Bernauer Straße continued to be run on a voluntary basis and only received limited project financing. This did not diminish the great commitment of the association members but could not replace long-term work in a secure institution. Any change in the poor treatment of the official memorial site to the Berlin Wall and division was not on the horizon.

On the 15^th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2004 an initiative by Alexandra Hildebrand, head of the Mauer Museum – Museum “Haus am Checkpoint Charlie” – burst into this void. Her temporary memorial to be put up on a abandoned area at Checkpoint Charlie did not only cause a stir on the Berlin politics scene. The memorial was made up of a replica of the Wall and over 1,000 wooden crosses – most of which were given a name. For many victims and their families, as well as for many visitors to Berlin, the memorial satisfied a need for an authentic place of memorial for the Wall (ill.2). The memorial and the public response to it made it unmistakably clear how great the unmet public need was, both for the city’s residents and for tourists, for a vivid place where the Wall and the division of the city could be conveyed in a meaningful way. References to the memorial on Bernauer Straße came to nothing – it was considered too objective and its location outside the centre of the city made it remote. For the first time, may victims felt they had been taken seriously by Alexandra Hildebrandt’s emotional memorial and its use of forms (ill.3).

Fig. 2

Whilst victims and tourists to the city welcomed the memorial as a powerful symbol, criticism was aimed at the instillation’s style. It was argued that the number of crosses could be seen as a reference to the number of victims, which was not possible to prove. The use of forms was also criticised for mirroring the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which had also only just been opened. Critics claimed that the analogy – 6,000 concrete blocks at the Jewish memorial and over 1,000 crosses at this memorial – would cause an equalisation between National Socialism and the SED dictatorship. Undeterred by the critical voices against the memorial, Alexandra Hildebrandt fought back, as she had done on other occasions, against the dismantling of the memorial, which she had initially claimed would be a temporary one. She organised demonstrations and victims of the communist dictatorship chained themselves to the crosses to protest against their being taken down. They argued that this was the only site in Berlin where the victims of the SED dictatorship were suitably brought into public consciousness. These “guerilla memorials” brought about an end to the inaction in Berlin’s politics. In November 2004, the “Abgeordnetenhaus” (Berlin House of Representatives) submitted two proposals by the CDU and B90/Die Grünen (the Green Party), in which the Berlin Senate was called upon to submit a concept for the preservation of the remaining Wall segments and the remembrance of the SED dictatorship. Both proposals called for the Berlin Senate to be more proactive in their efforts to remember the second dictatorship and its victims in Berlin.

Fig. 3

They claimed there were not only “shortcomings in the visible memorials to the Wall as a symbol of the history of the city, Germany and the world, but also in the comprehensive representation of the SED dictatorship in the areas of control, daily life and resistance.”¹⁹

In spring 2005, the Berlin House of Representatives organised a hearing to discuss “public engagement with the history of the capital city, Berlin-Wall memorials and the SED past”.

In light of the memorial site on Checkpoint Charlie (initiated by Alexandra Hildebrandt) and the public reaction to it, Berlin’s Minister of Culture, Thomas Flierl (PDS/Die Linke), had already begun to develop a concept for the design of a Wall memorial in summer 2004. On the one hand, the concept intended to secure and preserve any remains of the Wall still in the city as well as to protect from further development any sites where it was still possible to imagine the extent of the Wall and the death strip. On the other hand, any existing memorials should be made more visible and also refer to each other. There were already around 60 memorials which remembered escapees, or memorials made out of remains from the Wall, such as those located on Potsdamer Platz. Amongst these memorials was a double row of cobbled stones which had marked the path of the Wall since the start of the 1990s. However, recognising the stones was increasingly difficult as they were not used exclusively for marking the path of the Wall, but also for repairing damaged streets. There were no funds available to introduce a metal strip with the dates of the building and the collapse of the Wall, which had made mapping the path of the Wall possible.

The concept by the Berlin Senator for Culture was completed in 2006. It was intended as a comprehensive starting point for finding a way to commemorate the division of the city and the victims of the dictatorship for the 50^th anniversary of the building of the Wall in 2011. Thus, the area on Bernauer Straße was to be preserved on a large scale for the memorial; existing ground monuments such as the basements of the houses demolished for the clear field of fire were to be exposed and related to the stories and fates of the people associated with them. Until then, the site had drawn its effectiveness mainly from the events and campaigns organised by the association. A historical park was now to be designed; the plans envisaged a concept which covered the entire area up to “Mauerpark”. The concept finally achieved what had been called for again and again since 1990.²⁰

On 13^th August 2011, the newly designed memorial site for the Wall was inaugurated during a moving opening ceremony attended by the Federal President and the Chancellor. Thousands of Berliners as well as tourists turned out on this day together with their families to commemorate the building of the Wall and the division of the city. To date, the memorial welcomed a record-breaking number of visitors. As perceptions of the 17^th June 1953 uprisings in June 2011 demonstrated, remembrance of the Wall was starting to push other traumatic memories of the second dictatorship into the background. Whether the memory of the building of the Wall and its dramatic consequences for those imprisoned in the GDR dictatorship will become the defining memory of the second dictatorship remains to be seen.

The potential for it certainly lies in the fact that the historical event is interwoven with emotional images as well as specific buildings in the cityscape and moving fates and stories of courage, despair, sadness and treason. Our curiousity to see whether the memory of the building of the Wall and the deadly border regime will dominate the remembrance of the communist dictatorship of the GDR is warranted.

At the beginning of the sixth decade after the Wall was built, a culture of remembrance had finally established itself in Berlin, in which information about the Wall and the commemoration of its victims seemed to correspond to a far-reaching social consensus. On the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2014, a new naturalness in dealing with the Wall’s memory could be seen: The Light Border through Berlin brought hundreds of thousands of people from Germany and abroad to the former border between East and West Berlin, marked with light balloons, for days. Smaller and larger groups formed everywhere, people shared their experiences and memories of the Wall – and on November 9^th, there was a celebration at the Brandenburg Gate. At the same time, the Center for Political Beauty took advantage of the anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2014 and dismantled the crosses dedicated to the dead at the Wall at the Reichstag in Berlin in order to rebuild them at the external borders of Europe. Under the slogan “Prevent more Wall deaths”, the group wanted to protest German asylum policies and draw attention to the refugees who risked their lives trying to reach Europe. This action was declared the prelude to the “First European Fall of the Wall.” A year later, the campaign long forgotten, the Federal Republic took in nearly a million refugees and migrants within a few months, some of whom had travelled several thousand kilometres to get to Germany.

The decision of the German Chancellor to take in these people not only divided German society, but also led to major upheavals in the European Union that continue to this day. On the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2019 the situation had changed: The carefree celebration and serene thoughtfulness of 2014 had given way to a palpable tension. Plans for public events such as the one planned for November 9^th, 2019, at the Brandenburg Gate or along the course of the Wall were subject to previously unknown security considerations. Following the Islamist terrorist attacks in various European cities since 2015, such as the attack on the Christmas market at Berlin’s Breitscheidplatz, in which twelve people were murdered on December 19^th, 2016, public events were placed under security considerations in light of possible terrorist scenarios unimaginable only a few years earlier. And so, in the 60^th year of the Wall’s construction, the hope persists that the remains of the Wall, wherever they stand, may proclaim a message of the power of peaceful protest, of courage, and of the chance for people to live together in peace.

1Revised edition of the speech from 18^th June 2001 at the Berlin Wall Memorial (www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/de/der-mauerbau-1961-970.html).

2Rainer Eppelmann: Welcoming address to the commemoration of the 35th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Public meeting of the Enquete Commission “Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozeß der deutschen Einheit” of the Deutschen Bundestag 13. August 1996 in Berlin. Special printed. Deutschen Bundestag. Bonn 1996, p. 7.

3“Diepgen will Teile der Mauer neu aufstellen lassen”, in: Der Tagesspiegel 19.06.2010.

4Letter to the Minister of Foreign Trade from 10.11.1989, cited from Ronny Heidenreich’s chapter “From Concrete to Cash” in this volume.

5Telex from M. A. Consultancy to the Permanent Mission of the GDR in Bonn, 14.11.1989. BArchB DE 10/21, cited from Ronny Heidenreich’s chapter “From Concrete to Cash” in this volume.

6See the contribution of Ronny Heidenreich in this volume.

7The shooting order was not lifted until 22.12.1989.

8Quoted in “Streit um das Symbol des Schreckens”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung 13.08.1991.

9Leo Schmidt and Axel Klausmeier made an inventory of all the remains of the former border fortifications in Berlin. The book contains a lot of information that only informed observers can detect: concrete elements etc. Mauerreste – Mauerspuren, Westkreuz-Verlag Berlin 2004.

10The Minister of Transport had presented his plans for a four-lane street on 15^th July.

11“Was von der Mauer bleibt”, in: Berliner Morgenpost 13.08.1991.

12See also the entires from monument protection website (“Was weg ist, ist weg” – und darf nicht mehr rekonstruiert werden).

13“Die ausrasierte Stadtwunde”, in: Die Tageszeitung 13.08.2001.

14“PDS entschuldigt sich nicht für den Mauerbau”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung 11.08.2001.

15“Die Mauer im Kopf”, in: Die Tageszeitung 14.08.2001.

16Quoted from ibid.l.

17Ibid.

18Ibid.

19Statement by A. Kaminsky in light of the hearing on 25.4.2005, p. 1.

20Unfortunately, support for a Wall Panometer at Nordbahnhof by Yadegar Asisi was not given by the Mitte district authority, The plans were supported by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany, the Berlin Wall Foundation and the Berlin Senator for Culture – the plans were not realised due to a lack of interest from the district.

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