BRANDENBURG GATE

In the top picture, taken in 1988, sightseers mount a viewing platform on the edge of the British section of West Berlin for a better view of the monument over the 12ft concrete wall. On the platform, a tablet tells Berliners: ‘Your freedom is our undertaking.’

Twenty years on, how Germany has healed the scars of the Berlin Wall

01st November 2009

Twenty years ago next Monday, the Berlin Wall – the intimidating 96-mile manifestation of the Iron Curtain – fell, reuniting the city after 28 years and spelling the end for communist rule in East Europe.

These remarkable pairs of pictures, taken on the same spots decades apart, reveal how ordinary life has returned to the once divided city in the intervening years, with the unstoppable march of progress gradually obliterating the stark Cold War landscape.

The Brandenburg Gate – originally commissioned by King William Frederick II of Prussia in 1788 – was the most potent symbol of the partition.

 

Between the end of the Second World War and the erection of the Wall in 1961, 3.5million East Germans had fled west. After it was built, fewer than 5,000 escaped.

Today, Pariser Platz, in which the Brandenburg Gate stands, is again a bustling square.

The gate is now flanked by new buildings in the classical style: on the left is the Liebermann Haus gallery, while on the right is the Sommer Haus, housing a bank headquarters and the US embassy. The embassies of Britain, France and Hungary cluster nearby.

 

BERNAUER STRASSE

The ground floor of the residential block on the right side of the top picture – taken from the French sector of West Berlin in 1985 – was bricked up by the East German authorities after it was used for a series of daring escapes.

On two nights in October 1964, 57 East Germans managed to escape to the West through a series of tunnels dug from the apartment building. The attempt was spotted and shots exchanged between border guards and the tunnel-diggers.

 

 

 

Gradually, buildings next to the Wall were demolished to prevent desperate escapees jumping – to their freedom or their death – from windows and rooftops. The British Army helped demolish this section of the Wall, and today Bernauer Strasse is a busy main road and tram route.

The south side of Bernauer Strasse became part of the infamous ‘death strip’ – a no-go zone, up to 500 yards wide in places, cleared to provide an uninterrupted line of fire for East German border guards, who had orders to shoot on sight. In all, 239 people died trying to breach the Wall. The last was Chris Gueffroy on February 6, 1989.

The strip was floodlit and overlooked by 116 watchtowers, 20 command centres and fierce guard dogs. It contained anti-vehicle obstacles – visible in the foreground of the top picture – and was lined with finely raked gravel, making it impossible to move quietly, while beds of nails lay beneath overhanging balconies.




EBERT STRASSE

The first picture was taken in 1962, a year after the ‘Anti Fascist Protection Barrier’ – as the East German politburo called the Wall – was erected, and shows the full extent of the death strip.

Looking along Ebert Strasse towards the Brandenburg Gate, to the left is the only surviving pre-Second World War building in the area. Most were either destroyed in the war or cleared by border police to deter escapees.

 

 

 

Today, it has been preserved and redeveloped into an office block overlooking the now busy street, full of shoppers, tourists and business people. New buildings have sprung up on the former wasteland – monuments to the new Germany, and, of course, to the Western capitalism that paid for it.

After reunification, Berlin spent £50billion tearing down the Wall, erasing its traces and refurbishing the structures that communism had allowed to fall into ruin, with the death strip becoming the city’s most sought-after and expensive real estate.

At the end of Ebert Strasse, half a mile ahead, lies the famous Potsdamer Platz, which had been one of the busiest shopping districts in pre-war Berlin.

During the long, bleak years of the Cold War, this busy traffic intersection and public square was swallowed up by the death strip – but now it has risen again as the vibrant new heart of the rejuvenated city.

Article: HERE

                                                            

Sun Nov 1, 1:17 AM ET

                                   

Sun Nov 1, 1:17 AM ET

HOHEN NEUENDORF, Germany (AFP) – The mines and dogs and barbed wire are gone, as are the border guards with orders to shoot to kill, the so-called death strip and, of course, the Berlin Wall itself.

What remains are bitter memories, a handful of watchtowers, a vast green oasis rimming the capital, and dreams of using it in a creative way that still preserves its tragic history.

Dutch landscape architect Joyce van den Berg has set herself such a task, saying secret gardens, art installations and recreational spaces could flourish in what she calls a "trauma landscape".

The death strip or No Man's Land straddled the 155-kilometre-long (96-mile-long) border drawn around the free island of West Berlin by communist East Germany to keep its citizens prisoners of their own country.

Anyone caught in the buffer zone on either side of the Berlin Wall, or the inner-German border running between East and West Germany, risked being shot.

At least 136 would-be escapees were killed and after the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this November, Germans were keen to erase all traces of the despised barrier.

Nature has run wild in reclaiming the "Sperrgebiet" (Prohibited Area), which is up to 2.5 kilometres wide in some sections.

The result is a rich habitat that has nearly swallowed an extraordinary landscape, with unique plants and countless rabbits, foxes and deer reclaiming what was once theirs.

"In 20 years there will be nothing left of the bizarre landscape created by the Wall," Van den Berg said on a recent cycle tour of the strip, most of which still belongs to the German state.

"Twenty years on, the landscape is blooming and the butterflies are back."

Van den Berg began the project by documenting the entire Sperrgebiet on long bike rides with the help of maps collected by a former Stasi officer and archived aerial photographs.

She sees her work as a race against time, and her ideas range from the fanciful to the highly promising.

The route where soldiers patrolled is now a smooth bike path beloved by cyclists and history buffs. The group enters a clearing and comes upon natural dunes that have begun to develop again from the region's famously sandy soil.

The border patrols smoothed the sand with machines each day so they could observe any suspicious footprints of anyone trying to escape, and soaked the ground with pesticides so no undergrowth would block their view.

Van den Berg says a little tilling could allow "mega-dunes" to develop and attract volleyball and sand surfing enthusiasts, and bring badly needed tourism income to an economically depressed region.

"Oranienburg in particular could benefit if this area became a recreation centre," she said, referring to a city just north of Berlin best known as the home of the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen, now a memorial.

Van den Berg says she would like to keep alive the memory of escape tunnels dug to help spirit people from east to west, tracing their course with spotlights.

Checkpoints such as Dreilinden on Berlin's southern flank could also be revived as makeshifts hotel steeped in history, she says.

During the Cold War, West German trucks often spent hours parked until they were inspected and granted permission for transit into West Berlin.

Van den Berg suggests furnishing East German trucks for lodging, for example, after a bike tour of the Sperrgebiet. Others could serve as restaurants serving East German delicacies.

The tour continues past one of five of the original 302 watchtowers still remaining. Van den Berg would like to see old foundations used as wind-protected gardening plots.

One such watchtower is now used by the German Youth Forestry club, which has taken it over to teach about conservation and the region's painful history.

The group has erected a memorial to four teenagers shot dead in the 1960s and 1970s in foiled attempts to dash over the Wall to freedom.

Marian Przybilla, who volunteers with the club, said it took over the tower in May 1990, just two months after East German soldiers abandoned the site and five months before the two Germanys united.

"At that time, the joy over the fall of the Wall and the desire for free movement here meant that everyone wanted to remove the traces as soon as possible," he said. "Now we are trying to win back important parts of our history that were lost."

Although many of her ideas will never see the light of day, Van den Berg has a few powerful supporters.

Outgoing Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel has called for the entire former death strip between the former two Germanys to become a nature preserve.

But some tour participants from the east said the ride roused bitter memories.

"I have no regrets that they tore down almost all of the Wall, the barbed wire and the watchtowers," said Hannah Rohst, a 33-year-old architecture student from Niederschoenhausen in east Berlin.

"There was plenty I had no desire ever to see again, and so much we wanted to forget."




Article: HERE

                              

Sat Oct 31, 2:34 PM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) – George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl paid their respects to the ordinary people who were behind the peaceful revolution of 1989 that brought down the Berlin Wall at an emotional ceremony in Berlin on Saturday.

The three statesmen from the United States, Soviet Union and West Germany -- whose steady-handed leadership paved the way for the Wall's opening on November 9, 1989 -- recalled the heady events that led to the end of the Cold War at a ceremony attended by 1,800 people.

"We Germans don't have very much in our history to be proud of," said Kohl, 79, who was chancellor of West Germany and then united Germany from 1982-98. "But we've got every reason to be proud about German reunification."

The reunion in Berlin of the three leaders at the center of the whirlwind of events kicked off a week of celebrations in the German capital marking the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9.

Bush, U.S. president from 1989-93, paid tribute in his speech to the countless thousands of courageous East Germans who risked persecution by attending mass protests to demand reform in the months leading up to the Wall's peaceful collapse.

"It's a joy to be here with my former colleagues," said Bush, who repeatedly put his arm around both Gorbachev and Kohl during the two-hour long ceremony in a theater on Friedrichstrasse just east of where the Berlin Wall stood until 1989.

"The point needs to be made that the historic events we are gathered to celebrate were set in motion not in Bonn, or Moscow or Washington but rather in the hearts and minds of the people who had too long been deprived of their God-given rights.

"The Wall could never erase your dream, our dream of one Germany, a free Germany, a proud Germany," said Bush, 85.

The three former leaders clearly enjoyed each other's company at their first reunion in many years -- even though Kohl was in a wheelchair and had difficulty speaking while Bush relied on the help of a cane to move about.

BUSH PRAISES GORBACHEV

The Berlin Wall, a symbol of the Cold War that split the city and Germany, opened in November 1989 and the two Germanys reunited 11 months later. Researchers said at least 136 people were killed trying to cross to the West.

Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union at the time who was later awarded the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, said the opening of the Wall and end of the Cold War was the culmination of a long process of post-World War Two rapprochement.

"The people were the heroes," said Gorbachev, 78, who remains hugely popular in Germany for his pivotal role in the autumn of 1989. "The three of us don't want to take credit for the accomplishments of the previous generations."

Gorbachev, who went out of his way to say he thought "it's a good thing he (Barack Obama) won the Nobel Peace Prize" this year despite misgivings in the United States, also offered his unsolicited thoughts on Bush's predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

Bush had initially been criticized in some U.S. circles in 1989 for not rushing to Berlin to celebrate the opening of the Wall. By contrast, Reagan had delivered a hard-hitting speech just west of the Berlin Wall two years earlier in 1987.

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall," Reagan had said.

On Saturday Gorbachev brought that up and said: "We knew the first specialty of a president is that he has to be an actor."

Gorbachev added: "We've got to understand that the European project cannot be completed, that there won't be any triumph if it's built upon an anti-Russian or anti-American sentiment."

Bush was full of praise for Gorbachev on Saturday.

"I have no doubt, zero, that historians will recognize Mikhail for his rare vision and unfailing commitment to reform and openness despite the efforts of those who would resist change and ignore the call of history," he said.

"Today we have a fuller appreciation of the tremendous pressure Mikhail faced in that pivotal time. And through it all he stood firm, which is why he'll also stand tall when the history of our time in office is finally written."

(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; editing by Richard Williams)

Article: HERE