Tag: Berlin Wall

I went to see the Brandenburg Gate at night. I struggle to walk by this gate without thinking of Ronald Reagan’s comments of:

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

And I was thinking those words, I saw they’d put them at the underground station.

Some of the remaining sections of the wall, which once stretched for 27 miles, at the Memorial.

More wall. It’s hard to believe that they built a wall around half a city.

Visible on the left, they’ve taken a section of the wall away.

And placed it here.

There is a visitor centre but it’s really only for groups and it’s something of a badly designed mess. I did though get a leaflet about the history of the wall which was quite useful. Anyway, I think that’ll conclude my little series of witterings about this memorial, but I appreciate the efforts that have been made to explain the site and to preserve what they could.

Sophien Cemetery is still there and is a quiet and peaceful place where tens of thousands of people have been laid to rest.

Until the 1960s, all of this was also the cemetery, but it was inconveniently placed (from the East German perspective) where they wanted their lovely new wall to go. So, they decided to desecrate the graveyard and exhume the dead and move them elsewhere. The land was levelled and in 1985 they also demolished the cemetery’s chapel to create more space for their wall. The cemetery was the final resting place for many notable figures, including composers like Wilhelm Friedrich Ernst Bach (the grandson of Johann Sebastian Bach), the piano maker Carl Bechstein and the founder of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt. The chapel that they later demolished was built in 1898 and it became known as ‘the Cemetery of the Composers’ because of the musical links.

There’s the new cemetery wall in the background and the East German fence in the foreground.

A bit more of the old cemetery wall in the centre and that bit to the right of it is the remains of an old tomb.

West Berliners weren’t allowed to visit the cemetery for a long time and those East Germans who were allowed to visit had to apply for a special Grave Pass to be given entrance. Those with family members in the part of the cemetery destroyed for the wall must have been particularly upset, but the whole arrangement really was just a little sub-optimal.

It is true that this is of niche interest, but that is true for a great deal of this blog, so that’s fine. It’s the remains of a post that was set into the base of the former Sophienfriedhof (Sophien Cemetery) wall. As with my previous post, it’s irrelevant in many ways, but this fence and adjoining wall represented decades of suffering and splitting families apart. That yearning for freedom needs to be remembered so that no political leader in the future tries to shove a wall across the centre of one of the larger cities in the world. So that’s my excuse for being excited to take a photo of a bit of rusty fence post and the remains of a wall to a cemetery.

This is the sort of thing that interests me, although I’m surprised that considerable efforts have been made to preserve it. It had started to snow when I visited and there’s some evidence of that in the photo. I’m pleased that there was an information panel here as otherwise I would have never guessed what it was. I might as well just quote what that said:

“Before observation towers were installed on the border, the border soldiers had to make do with a temporary structure. This kind of temporary guard post with gun slits was erected on Bergstrasse in 1962. It was torn down when the border strip was levelled in 1966/1967. In place of it, a new watchtower was erected at the former Nordbahnhof station between 1967 and 1969.The cement base of the guard post that was placed over the remains of the cemetery well has been preserved.”

More on Sophienfriedhof (Sophien Cemetery) in later posts…. Really here is that I’m saying I was intrigued by a bit of old concrete and merrily stood in the cold and snowy weather to look at it. My friend Liam would be proud of me, he’s a civil engineer and so likes concrete and looking at it (although I think he’s more interested in watching it when it’s being poured rather than finding bits of old concrete to look at). But there’s some proper history there, an East German soldier (who could well still be alive) would have stood and been part of the crew that knocked down a bit of the cemetery wall to pour that concrete to build their temporary guard post. It all seems a waste of resources to me, but there we go.

The Berlin War Memorial is located by Gartenstrasse, a street which offers something of a wider perspective on the evolution of the wall because of its location. At first the residential street was lived in mostly by master masons and carpenters, but in 1772 ten gardener families moved into the area and the street became known as ‘Garden Street’. Then, following the end of the Second World War, this once quiet residential area found itself in the middle of the divide between East and West Berlin when the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (the ridiculously named anti-fascist wall) was constructed in 1961 and plonked down at this site.

A map of the site as the construction of the wall involved substantial changes to this area, including the removal of a road and the destruction of part of a graveyard.

A remaining section of the wall. Tragically, over the years several people lost their lives trying to cross the Wall near Gartenstrasse, including Heinz Cyrus, who died after being pursued by border guards and jumping or falling from the fourth floor of a border house at Gartenstrasse 85 in 1965. Fortunately, from a historical perspective, efforts have been made to retain some historic parts of the wall’s infrastructure and I found them to be of particular interest. Given this, there might be (well, there will be although how fast depends on whether or not Northern Rail’s wi-fi holds out which it isn’t at the moment) a few more posts about this site, to excite and delight my two loyal blog readers.