There is an area of this park in the center of Berlin that does not have trees, which makes it easy for the cold wind to hit the groups of schoolchildren, young people, curious people and tourists who walk on its grass. What there are are panels with photographs, videos and sound recordings that explain that you are in the Berlin Wall Memorial Site, on Bernauer Strasse, which separated the two Germanys, the communist and the Western one. The park extends for 1.4 kilometers and preserves 220 meters of the old border (which was a total of 155 kilometers long) to remember that there was the division of the world between communism and capitalism. The most obvious expression of what Winston Churchill had announced after the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War: “An Iron Curtain has fallen on the continent.”
Crossing Bernauer Strasse is the main headquarters of the five spaces of the Berlin Wall Foundation, created in 2009 by a citizen initiative that, as its director, Axel Klausmeier, explains, “researches, documents and interprets the history of this division and the subsequent unification process” after the fall of the wall on November 9, 1989. “In the following months, artists from both sides painted the concrete walls of this construction and defended that it was a legacy that should not be destroyed,” he adds. From there was born what is known as the East Side Gallery, 1.3 kilometers of works. “The memorial serves to commemorate the victims of the communist dictatorship,” especially the 141 dead from the wall. Also to raise awareness, especially among young people, “of how important the values of democracy are and that we must fight to maintain it.”
The history of the wall, including 20 of its meters, have just arrived in Madrid to the exhibition that will open to the public on November 9. It is the first venue of a seven-year European tour, which will end in 2029, 40 years after the beginning of what was also known as the “wall of shame.”
The exhibition, organized by the company Musealia and the foundation (an entity that is financed by the federal government, 52%, and the State of the city of Berlin, 48%) will be in Madrid for at least four months; How long it lasts will depend on the public that attends. With the title of The Berlin Wall. A world divided, in the Castellana Room 214 of the Canal Foundation, brings together some 300 objects. In addition to the meters of wall, there is barbed wire placed in the initial stage, which began on August 13, 1961; a baby stroller used for smuggling, the top of one of the watchtowers occupied by couples of soldiers: it is a nine-ton mammoth, 3.3 meters high and 4.3 meters in diameter; the gray uniforms of soldiers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR); a canoe that allowed them to escape across the Spree River, which in part of the city was the border.
![Panel with photos of the dead on the Berlin Wall, on October 31.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/wmnWuVCDnboLRDxQriotiqS8mVg=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KRKD52Y7EBGCHDH3PVS6WEX52E.jpg)
More: photographs, documentation, letters… the hammers and chisels with which Berliners and foreigners tore off small pieces of the wall when the communist regime collapsed like a house of cards. And a piece of what was sarcastically called “Stalin’s lawn,” which was a large carpet of steel spikes placed at the foot of the wall so that those who wanted to take the leap to freedom would think about it.
Beyond this material legacy, Klausmeier points out that the wall “is a powerful image of the absence of communication.” “When there is no peace in an area, there is a wall. It is a phenomenon that has been repeated in other parts of the world, today there are more walls than when it fell.” The head of the foundation’s Research and Documentation department, Gerhard Sälter, curator of the exhibition, emphasizes that “the wall fell peacefully, there was also a global need for freedom, which is why it symbolized the end of the Cold War.” “It was also the end, with whatever exceptions there may be today, of the experiment of socialist society.”
What do the citizens of today’s Berlin remember about that Orwellian nightmare? “Less than 40% of Berliners lived here at the time of the wall, something that is mainly due to immigration. Many of our visitors are under 35 years old, so they have no memories, but when they come and attend conferences they connect with history because they have relatives who did experience it,” adds Klausmeier.
Regarding those who managed to escape to West Germany, “a number impossible to calculate,” Klausmeier recalls the most ingenious cases: “One family escaped in a hot air balloon, another used a rope thrown with a bow, which became a kind of “zip line.” One that he really likes is the group that hired a small tourist boat, got the captain drunk, let him sleep it off in a boat, and headed west. Then there is the man who hid inside a giant electric cable bovine or the woman hidden in the undercarriage of a car… Although the most bizarre is that of the family that hid inside a glue cow that they had built. Klausmeier shows a book with a photo of the fake bovid, which seems to have inspired the film’s scriptwriters Top Secret for one of the most hilarious scenes in the film.
To continue with movies, Klausmeier’s favorite about what that was like is, “without a doubt, One two three”, the great comedy by Billy Wilder, starring James Cagney. “This film has a peculiarity. They started filming it in the summer of 1961, shortly before the wall began to go up, but they had to film part of it with a replica of the Brandenburg Gate in Munich because they could no longer film in the East.”
Your partner prefers Funeral in Berlin (1966), with Michael Caine, in which the head of the Soviet spy service plans to flee to the West. While the most representative song, in Klausmeier’s opinion, is by David Bowie: Heroes, which he wrote and recorded in a studio a few meters from the wall. The song tells the story of two lovers who meet next to the wall.
What happened to the lives of families or friends separated by this border? “During the first two years any communication was impossible. Then letters and some phone calls were allowed. Later, there was an agreement so that people from the West could visit their family on the other side for Christmas. Not the other way around.” The exception in paradise communist were the retirees. “As they consumed, but could no longer produce, they were allowed to move to the West. Which says something about what that system was,” says Sälter.
on a walk through the park that houses the memorial, Sälter chooses the most prominent information points, such as a photograph of a man waiting, sitting calmly at the bus stop while behind him a group of soldiers work raising a part of the wall. A space that amazes her is the panel with the photos of the dead. You have to swallow saliva to see those of the drowned children crossing the river.
On the ground there are remains of the foundations of the houses that were attached to the border. “About 1,200 people were expelled in October 1961,” adds Sälter, pointing to a photo of two men leaning out of a window of a building next to the wall: “Their heads were in the West but their bodies were in the East.” It is the prelude to several videos in which people are seen jumping from the windows of their houses and throwing their packages to flee communism. In some cases, firefighters from the West were waiting to pick them up.
An audio explains how relatives of those who died in the area buried them in the cemetery next to the wall because it was a way to see their friends or family on the other side. On the tour through the park the terrain rises slightly, some plaques on the ground remind us that escape tunnels were built there. “They were between 80 and 100 meters long and their occupants could not stand up. There was a group of about 20 people who spent six months there, digging.”
Back to the exhibition in Madrid, what idea would Klausmeier like visitors to leave with? “That it was a time and a place where people could judge you for your personal decisions and your private life because everything was political, and that it was more complex than a story of good and evil.”
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