Walls that speak
Walls that speak
Sunday, 25 July 2010
After having cleared my desk of work in Hong Kong last Monday, I have spent most of this week in Berlin with several of my fellow UWC Heads attending a very stimulating meeting that was organised jointly by the UWC German National Committee, the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Foundation) and the Heidefof Stiftung (Foundation).
Berlin struck me as being a most appropriate venue for this meeting as it was the home city of Kurt Hahn, one of the principal founders and original visionaries of the United World College movement. It was my third trip to Berlin, a city that I have always found intriguing because of its recent history and association with The Wall - a fundamentally important part of my personal psyche as a “Cold War Kid”.
A similar debate could also surround the original purpose of the big wall in my own country of residence, the Great Wall of China, arguably the original model for such barriers. Was it intended to protect the Chinese people from the invading Mongolians, or was it intended to stop the Chinese people from ‘emigrating’? And just like the Berlin Wall has now begun to do, the Great Wall of China has been generating revenue from tourism for a very long time.
Unfortunately, I had very little free time in Berlin, but what what free time I did have was spent exploring the Wall.
Since my last visit to Berlin three years ago, a new Berlin Wall memorial has been opened near Nordbahnhof Subway Station. Nordbahnhof itself was an interesting place as it was situated right on the line of the old border between East and West Berlin. Until reunification in 1989, its entrance was bricked up as part of the Wall, becoming what was known as a ‘ghost station’. A photographic display within the station now provides a very informative record of this interesting period.
The new Wall memorial is being constructed on Bernauerstrasse, a street with an infamous history during the Cold War. Unlike many of Berlin’s streets, in which the Wall ran down the middle of the street, the boundary on Bernauerstrasse was formed by the walls of several housing blocks, the lower doors and windows of which were bricked up by the East German authorities. This led to the spectacle of several residents jumping from upper floor windows to the street below which lay in West German territory. Needless to say, there were many injuries and deaths in this area, each of which is now marked with a small memorial.
The longest remaining segment of the Berlin Wall is a section known as the East Side Gallery. I had visited this part of the Wall during both of my previous visits, and I had been saddened to see its deterioration when I last visited in 2007. This section of the Wall had been decorated with large works of art expressing freedom and liberation soon after the Wall fell in 1989, but by 2007 the artwork had faded, become covered in graffiti, and parts had been chipped away by ‘wall-peckers’ who were wanting to sell chips of concrete to tourists as souvenirs.
I was delighted this week to see that the 1989 paintings have all recently been restored to their immediate post-socialist glory. As a result, this section of the Berlin Wall which was once a symbol of division and disagreement is once again proclaiming its joyous messages of peace, sustainability and anti-totalitarianism to the world.
It is perhaps the best service to humanity that the Berlin Wall has ever provided!