Читать книгу Where in the World is the Berlin Wall? - Группа авторов - Страница 36

The Wall in Lode Anseel’s garden, Zwevedele Wingene

© Lode Anseel

The Berlin Wall has become a passion for Belgian photographer, Lode Anseel. The fate of the divided city and its world famous concrete Wall have not left him since his first school visit in 1977. Anseel wanted to get back to Berlin immediately on 9^th November 1989 when he saw reports about the Fall of the Wall all over the press. However, it was not until 1990 that he actually made the journey. He was in Berlin when the famous border control point “Checkpoint Charlie” was closed on 22^nd June 1990. Anseel took countless photographs as well as a few small chunks of the Wall. He sold the chunks of Wall to a street-seller for four GDR Marks. In 1995, he opened his first larger photo exhibition about Berlin in Belgian Menen. Four years later, his pictures were presented to the public in Wingene – ten years after the Fall of the Wall.

By then, Anseel’s passion for the Berlin Wall had grown even more. He began to collect everything he could find that had anything to do with the former border and the GDR. He was particularly taken with the East German Trabant car. Anseel bought four Trabants in the nineties, amongst them a version which was used by the National People’s Army. He also owns a first generation Trabant P 50, which he managed to have signed by Soviet Head of State, Michail Gorbachev, Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) politician, Günter Schabowski, and GDR figure skater, Katrina Witt. He is particularly proud of one Trabant, which he has covered with banknotes and coins from 75 countries.

It was this passion for Trabants that led him be in possession of two Wall segments. He came across an article in Supertrabi (a magazine for Trabant enthusiasts) by a Berlin-based Trabant fan, who then put him in touch with someone selling parts of the Wall. Anseel also convinced his then employer, the Flanders Expo in Ghent, to buy a piece and organise the transportation. One piece remained at Flanders Expo and Anseel put the second in his garden. It still stands there today, complete with a small white plaque with the words: “ORIGINAL BERLIN WALL / POTSDA[M] MERPLATZ / NO MORE WALLS!, / FREEDOM AND PEACE / ALL OVER THE WORLD”