Where did the Berlin Wall go?
Posted: Friday, November 09, 2007 4:01 PM
Filed Under:
Mainz, Germany
By Andy Eckardt, NBC News Producer
This week, visitors to Berlin can get a feel for what it meant 18 years ago to look at Brandenburg Gate with a wall in front of it.
A South Korean artist has installed a fluorescent plastic copy of the Berlin Wall in front of the city's historic gate in protest of the enduring division of the Korean peninsula. But for many visitors interested in the history of the once-divided city, the display is just another piece of chic artwork in the vibrant German capital, and not much more.
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| Reuters |
| Korean Artist Eun Sook Lee performs next to her illuminated installation "Vanished Berlin Wall" in front of Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Friday. |
It is hard to find any of the few remaining sections of the Berlin Wall these days. After reunification, the German government was quick to sell off these reminders of the Cold War.
A few crumbling segments and a brick trail through Berlin are all that remain of the wall. In an odd way, the now sanitized path reminds me of the Freedom Trail in Boston – it does not resemble the gruesome "death strip" that was equipped with barbed wire, landmines and watchdogs to prevent East Germans from fleeing the country.
Checkpoint Charlie, the famous allied border crossing, is now just a small booth at the end of the elegant Friedrichstrasse, a major shopping area in central Berlin, where tourists can take photos with actors dressed up in old army uniforms.
Gorby – spotted near the old wall
And whatever happened to Mikhail Gorbachev, the man whose Russian policy of perestroika played an important role in the dismantling of the iron curtain?
Well, he’s been seen near the remains of the Berlin Wall recently – in a Louis Vuitton ad.
Gorbachev, a seemingly unlikely face of the French luxury handbag designer, is shown sitting in the back of a car as it drives past what remains of the Berlin Wall in a glossy ad photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
For sure, it was not an East German Trabant that he was sitting in. But it could have been.
The boxy two-cylinder vehicle that East Germans often had to wait up to 10 years to receive has not entirely disappeared from German streets. This loud, smelly symbol of the communist East has actually become somewhat of a cult object. It serves as a nostalgic reminder of life in the East, "Where not everything was bad," as many former East German citizens say today.
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| AFP-Getty Images |
| Young visitors stick flowers in a portion of the Berlin wall during a commemoration ceremony at the Bernauer Strasse memorial site in Berlin on Friday. |
Unified – but still dissatisfied
A recent poll found that a significant minority of East Germans – 21 percent of those surveyed – feel
that life was better before reunification. One reason for East German
dissatisfaction is that 74 percent think they are second-class citizens in the new Germany.
It seems that the frustration is mainly a result of continuing economic disadvantages. Wages in the eastern part of the country average 25 percent below those in the West and unemployment is twice as high in many eastern regions.
But, despite continuing economic challenges and a "wall in the minds" of some, most Germans remember November 9, 1989, for what it was: a euphoric, emotional and long-awaited reunion of a nation that had been physically separated by a wall for 28 years.
