What Remains by Jonathan Bach

Author:Jonathan Bach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

FIGURE 4.1  Black crosses at Checkpoint Charlie. Freedom Monument Scale Model in the Wall Museum showing the controversial project of 2004 by Alexandra Hildebrandt to commemorate the deaths of 1,065 people on the German border with black crosses at Checkpoint Charlie. 2009. Photo by author.

The city government felt compelled to disavow her memorial. In response, Hildebrandt drew attention to the fact that, as she put it, “there is nothing else” to commemorate the wall’s memory in an otherwise robust memory landscape. “She has a point there,” commented even the left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper that autumn of 2004, since “to this day the senators for urban development and culture lack an integrative and comprehensive concept for commemoration.”17 The lack of a memorial concept for the wall had been the result of over a decade of city government policy, most of it under the conservatives, and now the leftist coalition government found themselves in a politically delicate situation vis-à-vis the Freedom Monument, especially since the senator for cultural affairs, Thomas Flierl, represented the communist successor party.

The situation came to a head when Hildebrandt refused to vacate the property after a failed attempt to extend her lease, and the Berlin government was legally obligated to forcibly clear the space to protect the owner’s property rights, even though there was no other immediate use in sight.18 The result, predictably, was a showdown, dampened by a persistent pouring rain, all through the night of July 3, 2005. The general secretary of the Berlin Christian Democrats, Frank Henkel, told the press that the CDU could not “stand by and silently accept this barbaric act of demolition, this clear cutting of crosses.”19 Into the night a couple of former East German prisoners chained themselves to crosses, a priest scattered holy water, tourists gawked, and the police closed the street, while victims associations, politicians, and representatives of the U.S. Republican Party Abroad protested until, shortly after daybreak on July 4, 2005 (a date the Republicans interpreted as an intentional affront), city workers in yellow rain jackets gingerly loaded the crosses into trucks and cleared the site.

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