Читать книгу Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?. 170 Sites around the World онлайн
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The concept by the Berlin Senator for Culture was completed in 2006. It was intended as a comprehensive starting point for finding a way to commemorate the division of the city and the victims of the dictatorship for the 50th anniversary of the building of the Wall in 2011. Thus, the area on Bernauer Straße was to be preserved on a large scale for the memorial; existing ground monuments such as the basements of the houses demolished for the clear field of fire were to be exposed and related to the stories and fates of the people associated with them. Until then, the site had drawn its effectiveness mainly from the events and campaigns organised by the association. A historical park was now to be designed; the plans envisaged a concept which covered the entire area up to “Mauerpark”. The concept finally achieved what had been called for again and again since 1990.20
On 13th August 2011, the newly designed memorial site for the Wall was inaugurated during a moving opening ceremony attended by the Federal President and the Chancellor. Thousands of Berliners as well as tourists turned out on this day together with their families to commemorate the building of the Wall and the division of the city. To date, the memorial welcomed a record-breaking number of visitors. As perceptions of the 17th June 1953 uprisings in June 2011 demonstrated, remembrance of the Wall was starting to push other traumatic memories of the second dictatorship into the background. Whether the memory of the building of the Wall and its dramatic consequences for those imprisoned in the GDR dictatorship will become the defining memory of the second dictatorship remains to be seen.