Читать книгу Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?. 170 Sites around the World онлайн
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SO WHERE WAS THE WALL?
The images from the night of 9th-10th November 1989 are equally as iconic in world history as those from 12th-13th August 1961.
The crowds of people streaming through the open border crossings, sitting and dancing on the crest of the Wall, are as much a part of the public’s memory as the people standing frozen in front of the rolls of barbed wire in 1961 or the residents jumping out of the windows on Bernauer Straße, who saw these lethal jumps as the only way to get to the West and thus to freedom.
Although it was by no means a forgone conclusion to SED rulers in the GDR that the Wall and the border would remain open, deliberations were already being made on 10th November as to what should happen to this “historical monstrosity”. Whilst Willy Brandt – then the reigning mayor of West Berlin – called for sections of the Wall to be preserved as a memorial in his speech in front of the Schöneberg City Hall, others were already thinking of turning the Wall into a business. And so, on 10th November 1989, the first enquiries were sent from Bavaria to the GDR government offering cash in return for “unwanted pieces of your border fortifications no longer needed”.4 Finally, on November 14th, 1989, a business consultant approached the GDR’s Permanent Mission in Bonn and recommended - since the trade in parts of the Berlin Wall could no longer be stopped – that the GDR side should nevertheless consider “with all its ambivalence” that the “trade will be made with sections of the Wall, no matter where they come from. I consider it therefore all the more reasonable to make money from it.”5