Читать книгу Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?. 170 Sites around the World онлайн

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The desire for the city to return to some sort of normality after the long years of division was quite understandable. In 1990, very few could have imagined that there would one day be calls for the city and its people to make their wound visible once more. Removing the Wall from the city completely seemed a suitable way to overcome the division and its consequences as quickly as possible.

It was not only visitors to Berlin, whose interest in the Wall was warranted, who were increasingly perplexedly and asking: “So, where was the Wall?” At the same time, people had to accept that the notion of what the Wall had meant to the city and its people had faded considerably.

From very early on, some had voiced their opinion that the Wall should be preserved, at least in some areas of the city, as a memorial.

Willy Brandt was the Mayor of Berlin at the time and, on 10^th November 1989, during a speech in front of the Schöneberg City Hall, he had already called for “a piece of the construction (…) to be be preserved as a memorial to a historic monstrosity.”⁸ After almost all sections of Wall in the inner-city had been removed by the Mitte border troops, the East Berlin Magistrate decided to put the existing “ensemble” on Bernauer Straße under monument protection. Despite this decision, the sale and building, also on Bernauer Straße, proceeded. Almost 15 years would pass before a plan for the Berlin Wall would be developed and the majority of the former border fortifications would disappear without trace from the city landscape.⁹