Jurgen Boger has two weeks to rebuild the Berlin Wall. Yesterday the stone worker got to work on the last stretch with his team, crouched over the pavement in the scorching sun in Berlin's Potsdamer Platz.Thankfully, the Berlin Wall II is a more discreet version of the original. Instead of a hulking granite structure complete with an automatic machinegun-filled death strip, Berlin city fathers have opted for something simpler, a double row of cobblestones in the ground. The new "Wall" is only a few millimetres high and a mere 7.5km long.
In the last 18 months, the cobblestones have appeared at tourist attractions, such as the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie, showing the course of the wall through the city. Now workers are working against the clock to make sure the last stretch of the "Berlin Wall II" in Potsdamer Platz is finished ahead of the 40th anniversary of the building of the wall on August 13th.
Berliners will gather to remember their collective past as a divided city. The wall that divided them for almost 30 years can unite them in nostalgia. For that reason the city is happy to spend millions reinstating at least a trace of the wall that was enthusiastically torn down over a decade ago.
But the wall is an exception. After 10 years as the capital of the united Germany, Berliners are starting to get tired of living in a memorial and building around history. Berlin is suffering from memorial fatigue.
The first case of memorial fatigue came last summer when a representative for Sinti and Roma called for a memorial to the Gypsies murdered in the Third Reich. The then mayor, Mr Eberhard Diepgen, quite bluntly turned down their application to develop a memorial on a site adjacent to the Reichstag. "If we keep up like this, we will end up the memorial mile," he said.
His words struck a chord with some Berliners. Within short distances of each other in the city are dozens of memorials to the city's troubled past, mostly marking events in the Nazi period. There are memorials to politicians murdered by the Nazis, persecuted homosexuals and plaques marking Jewish graveyards destroyed by SS troops. There are signs listing the names of Nazi concentration camps on the main shopping street and the Holocaust memorial is under construction on a site beside the Brandenburg Gate.
Memorial fatigue took a political turn this week. In the Reichstag parliament building, renovators preserved one wall covered in graffiti left by Russian soldiers who reached the Reichstag in 1945, ending the Battle of Berlin.
A Bavarian politician has called for most of the graffiti to be scrubbed away after he translated it from Russian and said that 80 per cent was just juvenile scribbling along the lines of "Sergei was here". The fate of the graffiti remains uncertain, but several senior politicians have given their backing to see it removed.
The most high-profile case of memorial fatigue came when the Berlin Senate voted to convert an award-winning memorial into an underground carpark.
The Silent Library commemorates the night in Berlin in 1933 when students ransacked city libraries and burned more than 20,000 books by authors deemed decadent and "un-German" by the Nazis. A window set in the ground of a city-centre plaza reveals an underground room with four walls of floor-toceiling bookshelves, all empty.
"In the end, the site is not a graveyard or a sacrosanct altar but a normal plaza in the middle of everyday life," said a spokeswoman for the city Senate, adding that there are no other locations for a carpark.
Failing any last minute interventions, the work is planned to start next month. The plan has attracted muted criticism, mostly from students of Humboldt University, whose predecessors carried out the bookburning.
Berliners, like all Germans, have the deepest respect for their memorials and are conscious of their obligation to remember the past. While it is tiring, they are resigned to keep walking the line between bending over backwards to commemorate the past and getting on with rebuilding their capital.
