November 1989: Manfred Fischer, pastor of West Berlin’s Versöhnungsgemeinde at the Bernauer Straße, couldn’t sleep. Since the fall of the Wall, which had divided Berlin for almost three decades, so-called Mauerspechte, in English Wall Woodpeckers, have been hammering at the concrete of the structure deep into the night. Everyone wanted their little piece, their souvenir of the happy end of the communist dictatorship and the division of Europe. The pastor hurried out and asked the souvenir hunters to spare the hated Wall. He was not only concerned about his sleep. He was thinking about the future and the task of preserving the Berlin Wall for following generations.
At the end of December 1989, the GDR government decided to tear down the Wall. Soon after, Pastor Fischer declared on GDR television that the deadly border should be commemorated in the Bernauer Straße. He persuaded soldiers who were assigned to carry out the demolition to stop their work. He found supporters at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. They had a section of the Wall near Fischer’s community centre fenced off and guarded. With success: On his last day of work, October 2, 1990, the magistrate of East Berlin placed this section of the Wall, among others, under monument protection.
The Bernauer Straße evokes strong feelings: In the days after the Wall was built in 1961, it was here that people who wanted to flee jumped out of the windows of their GDR apartments into the West, some of them lost their lives. Pastor Fischer’s Versöhnungsgemeinde was suddenly divided, its house of worship was in the restricted area, and the faithful in West Berlin were left only with the community centre diagonally across the street. In 1985, the GDR blew up the church. In 1989/90, many finally wanted to forget all that – "The Wall must go" was the motto. The Senate of West Berlin planned to turn the Bernauer Straße into a six-lane street. A citizens’ initiative wanted to prevent this, and the state of Berlin did in fact decide to build a memorial. It was completed in 1998, soon followed by the documentation centre in the house of the Versöhnungsgemeinde. In 2000, the community inaugurated the Kapelle der Versöhnung, in English Chapel of Reconciliation, on the site where its church once stood.
"Where is the Wall?" more and more people visiting Berlin ask, of whom not all find their way to the Bernauer Straße. In 2006, the Berlin Senate therefore formulated an "Overall Concept for the Remembrance of the Berlin Wall." In it, the memorial on Bernauer Straße was the core of a "landscape of remembrance" that extended over about two kilometres of the Wall strip and was opened in 2014. Rusty steel and grass have since taken the place of the concrete and gravel of the border installations. The architecture is intended to make the Wall spatially comprehensible without having to rebuild it. What the border guards cleared away in 1990 remains irrevocably gone – and what Manfred Fischer and his collaborators saved is supposed to stand here for a long time to come.
