The Berlin Wall, Then and Now

One of the surviving bits of the Berlin Wall. 🧱 Most of it’s gone but I am glad they kept some as a reminder.

After the fall of the wall, a group of international artists came to the city and painted panels along this stretch. A private venture wanted to dismantle it and send this around the world as an exhibition, but fortunately others reached the decision to keep it where it was. There’s an authenticity here on the spot in Berlin that couldn’t exist anywhere else.

What surprised me was how insubstantial it looks. That wouldn’t stop anybody, right? 🤔 But there were 2 parallel walls with a “death strip” of bare land between them, and East German guard towers with orders to shoot to kill. 💀

They even built a wall underground in places, to seal off passageways from subway tunnels, because Berlin had a working subway system before its division. After the split, some of the stops became “ghost stations”. You could take a train that went underground between east and west, but it would roll right through these stations without stopping, and the platforms were patrolled by armed military. 🪖

But back to the death strips. When you visit today, you can listen to a reading of the guards’ instructions. Anyone trying to leave East Germany via the wall was a traitor, doing tremendous harm to their nation. In order to prevent this grave damage and encourage others not to follow the same path, the only solution was to shoot them. Soldiers should thus feel patriotic about killing their countrymen. ⚰️

When you have to work this hard to keep your citizens from leaving, there’s a problem… 😳

Where – East side gallery, Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪
GPS – 52.50445, 13.44085