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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
visited other sites along the route such as the Documentation Centre and
the ‘reinstated’ wall at Bernauerstrasse, Haus am Checkpoint Charlie and
other sections of the former wall such as by Kieler Eck, where a former
command post is still located.
As the Inner German Border and in particular the Berlin Wall has been
written about extensively I was able to draw on a large amount of literature
in building the background information. My main means of recording was
through photography and notes on which this chapter is based.
Background
On the edge of the western world
The fabric of the wall may have mostly gone but its ghost still haunts the
Berlin townscape. The areas of nothingness where the wall once stood echo
a past that many are trying to forget. Development projects are slowly
erasing the traces, filling the voids and gradually eating away, piece by piece,
the empty spaces. In other areas the memory of the wall is actively remembered:
the tacky souvenir shops; the preserved wall sections and guard
towers or as black and white photos in the small corner restaurant where I
eat my lunch, previously located right on the edge of the Western world at
Axel-Springer Straße.
On the morning of 13 of August 1961 Berliners woke up to a new landscape,
a speedily assembled wall brutally cutting off the city’s western
section from its surrounding areas, making it a stranded island within
communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). The border between East
and West Germany had already been closed since 1952 but the GDR leaders
saw the still open borders between East and West Berlin as a bleeding
wound making this a too obvious escape route through to the West.
Tension between the Western and Eastern blocs had been building for some
time and failed attempts to solve the ‘Berlin Issue’ between US president
Kennedy and Soviet leader Krushchev in June 1961 are likely to have
affected the decision to erect the Berlin Wall (Rottman 2008). Studies of
previously secret documents have demonstrated that between 1953–1961
the Soviets resisted repeated requests from East German leader Walter
Ulbricht to close the Berlin border claiming that it would be too disruptive
to Berliners as well as the peace keepers in the city (USA, England, France
and the Soviet Union) and would “place in doubt the sincerity of the policy
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