Günter Schlusche stood in what was once the foundation of Bernauer Street 10A, right in front of the cinder blocks and mortar that remained, just as they had half a century earlier, when East German workers bricked up the house’s windows the day the Berlin Wall went up.
“This is like a sunken ship that has surfaced to tell its story,” Mr. Schlusche said of the border house, evacuated on Sept. 24, 1961, and demolished less than four years later. The foundation was recently unearthed as workers expanded a section of the Berlin Wall Memorial that will be unveiled on Saturday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of its construction.
“Although it may not be a Greek temple, this is archaeology,” Mr. Schlusche said, shouting to be heard over the din of landscapers running mowers and leaf blowers to prepare for the arrival of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will attend the ceremony. Two years ago, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall was celebrated by the German government with guests from all over Europe. A ceremonial toppling of giant dominoes was meant to represent the fall of Communism across Eastern Europe.
This is a darker moment to recall, the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, when Berliners awoke to find that soldiers had erected barbed-wire barricades, closed down road traffic and sealed off rail links between East Berlin and West Berlin. To this day, the memory dredges up unresolved issues. Germans have never quite come to terms with the building of a wall that sundered their city for 28 years, forging a border where Germans shot Germans for trying to travel across town. The degree of ambivalence about the fall of Communism and the end of the East German state was evident in a survey published by the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung, in which a third of Berliners thought that the building of the wall was either justified or partly justified to stem the tide of refugees leaving for the West.
The task has fallen to Mr. Schlusche, the Berlin architect who coordinated the construction of the Holocaust Memorial not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to act as the conductor of the orchestra of builders, landscape architects, designers and painters to create a fitting monument on nearly a mile of land here that could finally help Germans come to terms with this element of their complicated past. The problem that confronted Mr. Schlusche and the team from the Berlin Wall Memorial was how to evoke the ominous feelings of a wall that is now mostly gone. Work crews demolished large sections of the wall after it was finally opened on Nov. 9, 1989, while individuals chiseled away pieces for souvenirs. Within a few years visitors could no longer tell in many cases where this relic of the cold war once stood.
The incomplete memorial is like a park, with peaceful fields of grass punctuated with information stands. Famous pictures are reproduced on the sides of adjoining buildings, such as the photographer Peter Leibing’s iconic image of a young East German soldier in his metal mushroom-shaped helmet making a balletic leap over the barbed wire to freedom. It is striking as a 20-foot-tall, black-and-white painting. But sections of the wall itself remain the focal point. Alongside original sections of the barrier, workers erected metal poles of the same height — roughly 12 feet — made from red-rusted steel that is often used in sculptures.
“A reconstruction is never authentic,” Mr. Schlusche said. “We are preserving the authentic.” The metal poles represent what he calls a “remapping” of the wall, not an attempt to recreate.
Ingrid Böttcher, a Berlin resident for 46 years, said she was uncertain about the steel poles when she read about them in the newspaper. But standing in front of them she declared, “It works.” She was hosting visitors and had just come from showing them the famous border crossing called Checkpoint Charlie, which she said was “just a carnival,” with actors in old military uniforms posing for photographs in a sea of tourists. Bernauer Street is more reflective. The displays include photographs of the victims, including small children, killed trying to cross the border. Visitors listen to audio testimony and watch videos as they walk along the former death strip, the no man’s land on the eastern side of the wall where guards shot to kill.
“You would be dead and he would be dead, and I would have quickly ducked over there,” said Axel Marquardt, 46, who grew up in the former East Germany near Magdeburg.
Mr. Marquardt recalled the first time he saw the wall. It was winter and he could see the prints from the guard dogs in the snow. He said he watched the patrols go by and thought to himself, “You could never make those 10 meters,” or roughly 30 feet.
Disagreements over the wall’s place in history are usually descried in terms of East Germans versus West Germans. But the lingering animosity today is mostly among East Germans, pitting the victims of the government against those who worked for the system, said Hope M. Harrison, a professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. She was in Germany this month promoting the translation of her book detailing how the Soviets tried to resist the demands of the East German leader, Walter Ulbricht, to seal off Berlin. “Among German historians and German experts it’s now taken for granted that Ulbricht wanted to close the border and the Soviets didn’t,” Ms. Harrison said. “But most Germans still put it off on the Soviets and the cold war and the U.S.-Soviet conflict.”
Mr. Schlusche said despite the remaining disagreement, the project was in many ways less controversial than the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by the New York architect Peter Eisenman and made up of 2,711 gray concrete slabs of different heights, placed not far from the Brandenburg Gate.
“That was a symbolic location whereas here we have the original location,” Mr. Schlusche said. Beneath his feet, strips of metal marked where tunnels to freedom were dug under the wall by escaping East Germans, and a few feet away where a tunnel by the Stasi, the East German secret police, was dug to prevent them.
The memorial is half a mile long right now and will ultimately stretch to four-fifths of a mile. “Our job,” Mr. Schlusche said, “is to make the terrain speak for itself.”
