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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
The materiality of the Berlin Wall is not limited to the city of Berlin itself
but actually stretches across the whole world. Many sections were moved
soon after the fall of the wall and scattered across the globe to be placed in
office buildings, at universities and especially popular, as part of memorials.
Sections of wall are today a commodity and in larger sections well-priced
collector’s items. Some people saw the potential in the materiality of the
Berlin Wall already as it was coming down and collected large amounts of
the concrete walls to sell on. Larger pieces are sold for considerable sums of
money to collectors all over the world. In 2008 an auction house in Berlin
reported to have sold one section of perimeter wall for 7,800 euros (BBC
News 2008). Smaller pieces of the wall are sold in souvenir shops or on the
internet and are often accompanied with a certificate to authenticate them.
As the smaller pieces are easily moved and there are no restrictions on
taking them out of the country they have contributed to the wall being
distributed all over the world.
The long section of wall, 1.3 km, which after an international spray and
paint event in 1990 became known as the East Side Gallery was actually a
hinterland wall even though the same material was used as for the ‘enemy
facing wall’, Border Wall 75. This was one of the only places where the
eastern side of the border defences were visible to any state visitors as well
as others who travelled on Mühlenstrasse which was the main route to
Schönefeld Airport. It was therefore made to look the same as the wall seen
from the West in order to play down the severity of the border fortifications
(Klausmeier and Schmidt 2004:194). This wall is now one long, open air art
gallery with a large number of visitors every year (Figure 11).
Crossing over
As the wall blocked the majority of the routes between East and West Berlin
any traffic between the two had to be channelled through the official
crossing points. There were 14 crossings from West Berlin to the GDR of
which eight were located within the city centre. There were strict rules as to
who was allowed to cross at the different crossings and the infrastructure
put in place helped to control the flow of pedestrians or vehicles. The lanes
used to route traffic through the crossing were still visible when the
archaeological survey was carried out in 2001–2003 (Klausmeier and
Schmidt 2004:82 and 126).
The most famous crossing was the so-called Checkpoint Charlie located
at the corner of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße. Only foreign nationals
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