A Tour of the Bernauer Strasse Wall Memorial with Libby, Roxana and Dominic

This week our students Libby, Roxana and Dominic took us on a tour of the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse. We started the tour in the subway station, which during East German times had been a “ghost station” — because it lay in the East, it was a place that West German subways passed through but did not stop. Sometimes armed guards could be glimpsed in the darkened stations, but otherwise they were silent. Now they’ve been restored, and the U8 train stops at all the stations between Moritzplatz and Voltastrasse once more!

Emerging at street level, we entered the memorial site, which stretches for several blocks. The park encompasses what was formerly the ‘death strip’ – the space in between the two halves of the wall that divided East from West. Our tour guides directed us toward the many markers of structures that once existed on the site, including escape tunnels (right).

One of the most remarkable structures to have inhabited the death strip was an entire church, paradoxically named the Church of Reconciliation. It was demolished in the early 1980s by the East German government, but the foundations remain (left) and are now incorporated as relics in the park. A chapel has been built on the site to commemorate the many who died trying to escape over the wall.

Another portion of the park contains a reconstruction of the wall as it existed during East German times. This consists of a wall on the east side, then a large expanse of sand and barbed wire, and then finally another concrete wall on the west side. From the viewing tower that is part of the memorial museum (below), you can look down into this reconstructed portion.

Perhaps what is most amazing about this site is that it’s one of the only places in Berlin that you can tell there was ever a wall at all! The rest of the city has been so thoroughly sutured back together that you really have to hunt for the traces. This park preserves the memory of the terror that the wall once represented for Berlin’s citizens.