An ingenious reinvention of the Berlin Wall was unveiled at the Brandenburg Gate on Thursday as the German capital remembered its dark day of division 65 years ago.
Early on August 13th, 1961, Berlin’s soft sectoral divide became an impenetrable Cold War barrier of barbed wire and bricks that would claim 140 lives before it was breached, peacefully, 28 years later.
Artist Hubertus Hamm’s wall installation – 30 metres long and three metres high – comprises a vast network of aluminium tubes that resembles a giant beehive and distorts the view on the other side.
In the Thursday sunshine, fascinated people waved to family and friends on the other side, unwittingly echoing the desperate gestures of separated families caught off guard by the overnight division of their city 65 years earlier.
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Black and white photographs capture their desperate plight in an open-air exhibition at the Brandenburg Gate, the city landmark cut off for nearly three decades in the death-strip between socialist East Berlin and capitalist West Berlin.
For 68-year-old Harald Wegner, who grew up in West Berlin, the exhibition triggered “goosebumps” about the 155km wall that, as a child, seemed to him “omnipresent and impregnable”.
“We were lucky compared to those in East Berlin,” he said, studying the exhibition. “In a photograph here I saw the spot where my childhood friend used to go to wave to his grandmother in the east.”
For 42-year-old Marc, visiting from the western city of Bochum with his wife and two young children, explaining the roots of German division is a challenge.
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“We tell the kids there were two systems,” he said, “one where people did things for themselves with additional help for the weak and another where the state wanted to control everything.”
At official ceremonies to remember the victims of German division, politicians recalled how East Germany, from its foundation in 1949 until 1961, lost three million people. On August 13th alone, as East German soldiers severed streets, about 800 Berliners made perilous escape attempts rather than remain in the Soviet-controlled sector.
Bundestag president Julia Klockner warned about the consequences of ongoing mental divisions in many German minds that had lasted far longer than any physical divisions.
With an eye on a far-right surge in eastern federal states, she added: “The ideas of 1989 were ideas of freedom and today they are in danger again, not by barbed wire . . . but through the illusion that simple answers can solve complex questions.”
Back at the Brandenburg Gate, visitors expressed hope the aluminium “wall” and temporary exhibition could be retained.
“I never saw the wall with my own eyes but these texts and images are so well done,” said Georg, a 44-year-old Berlin theologian. “It’s great that the exhibition is online, too.”
