Berlin Now by Peter Schneider

Author:Peter Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374712105
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

EPILOGUE

In early March 2013, a demonstration at the East Side Gallery brought about an unexpected turn of events. Unlikely slogans could be heard near the section by Mühlenstraße in the Friedrichshain district: “The wall must stay,” groups of demonstrators shouted, while others chanted, in English, “Mr. Wowereit, don’t tear down this wall!”—a play on Ronald Reagan’s famous call from 1987, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The reason for the demonstration was an investor’s attempt to cut out a sixty-two-foot-long section of the East Side Gallery to clear the way for the entrance to a new apartment tower. The plans called for the removed sections of the Hinterlandmauer to be set up again at another location. The investor had a valid contract in hand, signed by the district’s mayor, a member of the Green Party. But the demonstrators, many of whom hadn’t even been born while the Wall still stood, were attached to the East Side Gallery and didn’t want to relinquish a single chunk of it. They pointed to the millions of euros in taxpayer money that the city had only just invested to renovate the East Side Gallery—and now the landmark was supposed to make way for an investor? The protest quickly swelled into a mass rally with some six thousand demonstrators, capturing the media’s attention. Young protestors were joined by older Berliners, who, now—twenty years after the fact—wanted at all costs to hold on to what was left of the cursed wall. One twenty-year-old announced through a microphone that even a tiny gap in the East Side Gallery would destroy the sense of constriction and imprisonment that had reigned here during the years of the Wall—a feeling he was keen to preserve. A man from the landmarks preservation society went so far as to say that Berlin was “the modern Rome of archaeology” and had an obligation to protect the monuments of the past.

Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit made the matter a top priority. He saw no reason, he asserted, why the East Side Gallery shouldn’t be preserved—he would talk to the investor and district mayor. But, in the end, at the break of dawn, the construction vehicles advanced again after all, biting a chunk out of the wall. The demonstrators hadn’t woken up in time for the investor’s surprise coup; Berlin’s mayor acted shocked. This tug-of-war is sure to continue for a while.

Yet, with or without a gap, it seems the East Side Gallery will be preserved—an astounding reversal in the history of Berlin’s attempt to define itself. For there is virtually nothing authentic about this wall that is now being protected: the meager Hinterlandmauer itself was but a shadow of the real Wall, and all the paintings on it date to after the fall of the Wall. But isn’t it decidedly better to maintain at least a fake—an ersatz—Wall in Berlin than nothing at all?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.