Berlin Wall Memorial

The story

After 1945 Berlin was divided among the four victorious powers. By 1961 more than two and a half million people had left East Germany, most of them through the open border in the city. Early on Sunday 13 August 1961 the East German government closed it with barbed wire, and within days began to build a wall.

It stood for twenty-eight years, two months and twenty-seven days. At least 140 people died at it. In China these years run from the last of the three hard years to the eve of the 1990s.

Close by, with a page of its own: East Side Gallery, Brandenburg Gate, Hiroshima Peace Memorial.

What is here

An open-air memorial along a public street, with two free exhibition buildings.

If you have one minute

On the viewing platform, looking down

Across the street a tower of steel stairs stands beside the documentation centre. Climb it. It is free. From the top you look down into the only piece of the border that is still complete.

Nearest you is the wall everyone knows: grey concrete, 3.6 metres high, with a round pipe on top so that hands could not grip. That faced the West. But the Wall was not one wall. Behind it is a strip of raked sand that showed footprints, a road for patrol cars, a line of lamps that burned all night, a watchtower, and then a second wall facing the East.

An East Berliner who wanted to leave had to cross all of that, from the far side, under the lights. The people who built it called it the "anti-fascist protection rampart". Every part of it faced inward.

Things people often get wrong

"The Wall divided Germany." The border between the two German states was 1,400 kilometres of fence further west. The Wall ran round West Berlin, 155 kilometres of it, and made the western half of the city an island inside East Germany.

"It was built to keep enemies out." The guards looked east. Almost everyone shot here was trying to leave.

"Nobody intends to build a wall" sounds like a line made up afterwards. It is not. The East German leader Walter Ulbricht said it at a press conference on 15 June 1961, two months before the wire went up, and it is on film.

"It fell on 9 November 1989." It was opened that night, by mistake, when an official misread a note at a press conference. Tearing it down took until 1992.

"The painted wall is the real one." The long painted stretch by the river is real, but it was painted after 1989. While the border stood, the side facing East was kept blank.

People who stood here

• Ida Siekmann (nurse, 1902–1961)She lived on the third floor of number 48. On 22 August 1961, the day before her fifty-ninth birthday, with the front door nailed shut, she threw her bedding into the street and jumped after it. She was the first person to die at the Wall.
• Conrad Schumann (East German border policeman, 1942–1998)He was nineteen and on guard at the corner of Ruppiner Straße on 15 August 1961, when the border was still a coil of wire. People on the western side called to him to come over. He threw down his cigarette, ran and jumped. A photographer was waiting.
• Frieda Schulze (pensioner, aged 77 in 1961)On 24 September 1961, aged seventy-seven, she climbed out on to her first-floor window sill at number 29. East German police leaned out and held her by the arms. West Berliners below pulled her by the ankles. The West won.
• Reinhard Furrer (student, later astronaut, 1940–1995)In 1964 he helped dig a tunnel 145 metres long from a bakery cellar on this street to an outdoor toilet in the East. Fifty-seven people crawled out through it in two nights. In 1985 he flew on the American space shuttle.
• Egon Schultz (East German border soldier, 1943–1964)A teacher of twenty-one doing his service. He was shot dead in the yard where Tunnel 57 came up. East Germany named schools after him as a man murdered by Western agents. Files opened after 1990 showed that the fatal bullet came from another border soldier's gun.
• Manfred Fischer (pastor, 1948–2013)His church stood in the death strip and was blown up in 1985. In 1990, when everyone wanted the Wall gone, he stood in front of the bulldozers on this street and insisted that a piece be kept so that it could be explained. The memorial exists because of him.
• John le Carré (English novelist, 1931–2020)He was a young intelligence officer in Germany in 1961 and came to watch the Wall go up. He went home and wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in five weeks. It ends with two people climbing the Wall at night under a searchlight.

Go deeper: eight stops along the street, west to east

Everything outdoors is free and open from early morning until late evening. The two centres are free and closed on Mondays.

1. The station of ghosts

Begin under ground, in the S-Bahn station Nordbahnhof. Three train lines from West Berlin ran under East Berlin for a few minutes on their way. The trains did not stop. The stations were bricked up and dim, with armed guards on the platforms. West Berliners called them ghost stations. An exhibition in the hall tells the story.

2. The steel rods

Come up to the street. Where the Wall has gone, its line is marked by rust-red steel rods as tall as it was. Walk beside them and you see through; stand at an angle and they close into a solid wall.

On the end walls of the houses are photographs as big as the houses, of what happened at that spot.

3. The window of remembrance

A wall of rusted steel holds small windows, one for each person known to have died at the Berlin Wall, with a photograph, a name and two dates. Some windows are empty: no picture could be found. The youngest was a baby; several were children who fell into the river on the western side, where western rescuers were not allowed to go in after them.

4. The piece that was kept

Between two high steel walls is the seventy metres you saw from the tower. You cannot go in. Narrow slits in the back wall let you look through from the eastern side, as nobody could at the time.

The inscription says the place is in memory of the division of the city and of the victims of communist tyranny.

5. The street of windows

Walk east. For the first weeks the houses themselves were the border. People climbed down ropes, slid down sheets, jumped into nets held by the West Berlin fire brigade. Then the windows were bricked up, floor by floor. In the mid-1960s the houses were pulled down, all but their ground-floor fronts, which served as the Wall until 1980.

Steel strips in the ground mark the outline of each house.

6. The tunnels

The soil here is firm clay, good for digging, and the cellars on the western side were close to the line. More tunnels were dug under this street than anywhere else. Their routes are marked in the grass with steel plates. In 1962 an American television company paid for one, in return for the right to film it. Twenty-nine people came through.

7. The chapel

A brick church of 1894 stood exactly on the line. After 1961 its door opened on the death strip and nobody could reach it. Border guards used the tower as a lookout. In January 1985 the government blew it up, to clear the field of fire. The film of the spire falling went round the world.

On the same spot stands a small oval chapel of 2000. Its walls are rammed earth, mixed with the crushed brick of the old church: look for the red specks. Round it grows a field of rye, sown and cut each year, on what was the sand strip.

The cross from the old spire, bent by the fall, lies beside the path.

8. The jump

At the corner of Ruppiner Straße a line in the pavement marks where the wire lay on 15 August 1961. The photograph of the soldier in mid-air, his rifle slipping from his shoulder, was taken from the western pavement.

The same shot: stand on the eastern side of the corner, where he stood, and look west. It is a few steps.

The street goes on to a park where, on Sundays, half of Berlin comes to a flea market and sings karaoke in a stone bowl on what was the death strip.