Читать книгу Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?. 170 Sites around the World онлайн
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The potential for it certainly lies in the fact that the historical event is interwoven with emotional images as well as specific buildings in the cityscape and moving fates and stories of courage, despair, sadness and treason. Our curiousity to see whether the memory of the building of the Wall and the deadly border regime will dominate the remembrance of the communist dictatorship of the GDR is warranted.
At the beginning of the sixth decade after the Wall was built, a culture of remembrance had finally established itself in Berlin, in which information about the Wall and the commemoration of its victims seemed to correspond to a far-reaching social consensus. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2014, a new naturalness in dealing with the Wall’s memory could be seen: The Light Border through Berlin brought hundreds of thousands of people from Germany and abroad to the former border between East and West Berlin, marked with light balloons, for days. Smaller and larger groups formed everywhere, people shared their experiences and memories of the Wall – and on November 9th, there was a celebration at the Brandenburg Gate. At the same time, the Center for Political Beauty took advantage of the anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2014 and dismantled the crosses dedicated to the dead at the Wall at the Reichstag in Berlin in order to rebuild them at the external borders of Europe. Under the slogan “Prevent more Wall deaths”, the group wanted to protest German asylum policies and draw attention to the refugees who risked their lives trying to reach Europe. This action was declared the prelude to the “First European Fall of the Wall.” A year later, the campaign long forgotten, the Federal Republic took in nearly a million refugees and migrants within a few months, some of whom had travelled several thousand kilometres to get to Germany.