Mauerfall

 

For the past few weeks, the attention here in Berlin has all been focused on the 25^th anniversary of the ‘Mauerfall’.  Had we kept to our original plan of living in the city for a year, we would have been back in England now and would have missed this special time.

On 9^th November 1989, after having divided the city for almost thirty years, the Berlin Wall was opened, changing the course of world history.  For the fall of the Wall brought an end to a political situation that had originated in ideas formulated in the Nineteenth Century and which had evolved through two world wars, the collapse of three empires and the emergence of totalitarian dictatorships, to decades of tension between two nuclear superpowers.

For someone old enough to remember the Wall and its demise, it’s almost impossible to imagine that it has actually been down now for almost as long as it had stood and that a whole generation has been born and grown up without it being an immutable part of the political landscape.  Because that’s how the Wall had seemed during the years of the Cold War.  It was the physical embodiment of the ‘Iron Curtain’, an impenetrable border between the Western world and the Communist Bloc, as obdurate as the conflicting ideologies either side of it.  And there cannot have been a more emotive symbol of that conflict. 

For the West, the Wall represented oppression whilst the East Germans who ordered its construction regarded it as a necessary means of preventing citizens educated and trained at the DDR’s expense from taking their skills to the West.  Many who still attempted a Westward move without going through the official channels were killed in the process.  Narratives of the Wall tell of both successful and failed escape attempts and of the impact it had on those whose lives were marked by it.  Psychological repercussions were inevitable and, though the Wall has been gone for a quarter of a century, the ‘Mauer im Kopf’ has proven a much more resilient barrier.

Reunification too has not been without its problems.  Many East Germans have felt that it amounted to an invasion resulting in the loss of their homeland while the Western view is that the country should never have been divided in the first place.

As a left-leaning Cold War kid, I was pained by the collapse of Communism in that I’d hoped a modernised, more open form of socialism might take its place.  Without it, rampant capitalism has been allowed to flourish unchecked and the consequences have been dire for the whole world.  I’m not denying that the dismantling of the Wall was a good thing, I just believe that not all of the subsequent developments have been.  It’s also ironic that Western leaders, so vociferous in their condemnation of the Berlin Wall are now utterly silent about Israel’s brutal ‘West Bank Barrier’.

The border crossing at the Bösebrücke at Bornholmer Strasse was the point at which the Wall was first breached.  Last Wednesday, we took a walk down to the bridge to have a look at the ‘Lichtgrenze’ as it was being set in place (the Lichtgrenze, or ‘light border’ is a nine-mile trail of illuminated balloons laid out along the course of the Wall between Bornholmer Strasse and the East Side Gallery to commemorate the Mauerfall). 

 

The installation leading down from the bridge...

 

 

...towards the Mauerpark

 

By Friday, the balloons had been added and all over the weekend, images of the Lichtgrenze appeared on TV and social media.

 

Friday in the Mauerpark

 

On Saturday I found myself down by the Brandenburger Tor.  It was absolute chaos - certainly not for me - but I did manage to take a few photographs.

 

 

'Entertainment' at the Brandenburger Tor, Saturday evening

This evening, we’re going to witness the balloons being released.  It’s been an amazing experience being in the city for such a momentous anniversary – I can only imagine the euphoria here twenty five years ago.