Berlin Wall panels now serve a variety of purposes including an art gallery and a momento for the king of Tonga – as well as a possible role in a forthcoming U2 concert, writes Derek Scally
FOR ANYONE looking for the Berlin Wall, Berlin is the wrong place to start.
Since the abrupt end to its 10,315-day reign as a Cold War border in 1989, chunks of the concrete structure have spread to the four corners of the world, from the UN in New York to Vatican City.
The king of Tonga owns a panel, as does Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
What little is left in Berlin (see below) has been stripped of its second “hinterland” wall and death-strip trappings of razor wire, mines and self-triggering machine guns.
When the border was sealed at midnight on August 13th, 1961, under cover of darkness, the “wall” was a barbed wire fence between the postwar Soviet and Allied sectors.
Two months after denying there were plans to erect a wall, East German leader Walter Ulbricht presented his so-called “anti-fascist protection barrier” as a cordon sanitaire protecting East German socialism from the pernicious influence of western imperialism.
Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor as politburo general secretary, supervised the sealing of the border in 1961 and spent his life “improving” it.
In January 1989, eight months before the end, he proclaimed with a father’s pride: “The wall will remain standing in 50 or even 100 years.”
Though far more than just a wall, it is the Berlin Wall’s blank concrete panels with the rounded top that have burned their way into the popular consciousness.
Abandoned, crumbling panels of the wall show up in unlikely spots around the city, but most has vanished underfoot: the panels were removed in 1990 and ground up for use as new foundations around the Brandenburg Gate and the nearby Wilhelmstrasse.
The small town of Malcin, two hours north of Berlin in the state of Mecklenburg, is home to the factory that “made” the Berlin Wall.
The former state-owned plant was privatised in 1990 and demolished after closing in 2005 but, in the 1960s, over 400 people worked there.
They knew the final destination of the three-metre L-shaped panels, but didn’t talk about it. “No one here ever felt anything like guilt because we created the elements to secure the border. It was just regular work like anything else,” says former manager Wilfried Zimmermann. “These were ordinary people who earned their living to feed their family. They’re not terrorists.”
The final order for panels, made in December 1988, was cancelled nine days after the first three panels were lifted out of the wall at Potsdamer Platz.
Those three panels are now owned by Berliner Hans Martin Fleischer, who bought them for a “five-figure sum” in 1990.
He hoped to make his fortune by selling them on to a collector, but dwindling interest and a swastika sprayed on one of the panels, made them unsaleable.
Today he is happy he kept them and dreams of returning them to their original site on Potsdamer Platz. “This location fascinates me, it was the centre of Berlin,” he says. “It is my dream to display the panels in a new building on the site. All I lack is the money.”
For now, he has offered to lend the panels – or a lightweight replica he has created – to U2 for their Berlin concert on Thursday.
“I’m a big fan,” he says. “Bono is an incredible ambassador for peace.”
Three inner-city Berlin Wall sites:
Niederkirchnerstr:as featured in a luxury brand advertisement with Mikhail Gorbachev
East Side Gallery:at 1.3km the longest stretch of the wall, home to over 100 recently restored artworks from 1990.
HOW THE WALL CAME DOWN: 1989 RECALLED
GRIT SCHMALISCH (JOURNALIST, PR AGENT)
"Growing up in the East, people used to laugh at me when I was a child for announcing at every birthday that, when I grew up, I was going to go to Paris. So when I turned 18 a month after the Berlin Wall fell, it seemed like it fell just for me. Like thousands of others, I was enrolled to march in the 40th anniversary parade of East Germany on October 7th.
I remember the shock of arriving on Alexanderplatz in our uniforms when the Berliners began cursing us. For them we were country bumpkins enlisted as extras in a charade, and I suppose we were. I remember the organisers trying to drown out the cheers of "Gorby! Gorby!" – directed at Mikhail Gorbachev – by turning up the music, but at some point it wasn't possible any more. There was something euphoric and morbid about it all.
BJÖRN MERTEN (ARCHITECT)
"The evening of November 9th, I went to a friend's house in West Berlin. His father greeted me at
the door with a glass of champagne, saying: 'Björn, the wall has fallen'. I thought he'd had too much to drink, but it was on the news. A group of us piled into a car and headed for the border, picking up on the way a friend of a friend I didn't know, Ismene. We went from one checkpoint to the next, but there were no crowds and they wouldn't let us across, so we went home, watched television, talked politics and drank. By the time the border crossings were open we were all too drunk to go anywhere. I got talking to Ismene and we eventually fell asleep together. The night the wall fell was my last night as a bachelor. We've two children now and on November 9th this year were getting married.
Bernauer Strasse: a stretch of wall and documentation centre