Re-discovered Rubble, pt. II

As I mentioned in my last post I rode my bike along the edge of Wedding and the Mitte a few weeks ago unknowingly retracing the path of the Berlin Wall. This was an unconscious bike ride following the next point on the horizon that caught my attention. Also, because the wall is almost entirely gone it makes it hard to follow its path, but the void it created still remains in many parts of the city.

There are still a few sections of the wall standing, the longest is the East Gallery that runs along the banks of the Spree River and acts as a canvas for a rotating selection of graffiti and murals. There is also a few slabs standing in the middle of Potsdammer Platz, the epicenter of 'new Berlin', and on this day I discovered the second largest remaining section of the Wall. This section is the official Berlin Wall Memorial and is unmistakable. This location consists of a chapel, a time line billboard, a documentation center, and a memorial that includes a section of the wall.



It is unmistakably a memorial because the 50 meter section of the wall is bookended by two enormous slabs of steel, similar in appearance but larger than any of Richard Serra's work. The elements of a raw iron wall lined with aluminum and the concrete section have a certain rhyming but they are both outdone by what was the most impacting feature of the wall, the 30 meter void that ran along the original wall and cut through the city. This area know as the 'death strip' or 'no man's land' has been recreated and sealed in by walls on four sides creating a literal time capsule. It is a time capsule that exists in real time, experiencing the same air and weather that we do but is sealed off to stand in for an eternal emptiness.



Peering through the cracks in the make shift wall and staring into this void was an incredible experience. There was something almost literary about it, my thoughts came in fragments. First, as nouns. Gravel, ground, stone, sky, barricade. Then the thoughts came as adjectives. Grey, cold, endless, empty. The words never fit together just laid in front of me like lifeless objects, I was speechless. My mind wandered through the architecture of Samuel Beckett's writing, the coffins, the cabins, the trenches and a number of other post-war books that I read in school as a child but whose names escape me now. One story in particular about a man who lived in a bunker who was waiting for the call to push the 'button' but the call never came, leaving you to wonder if he was the last man on Earth.



editorial comments:
The recreation of the death strip is a rare specimen of Berlin history, even down to the zen garden-like raked gravel that spans between the walls. This gravel was raked to make any traces of footprints easily visible and from what I understand was often laced with explosive mines to further detour anyone from trying to cross the wall. The memorial only has one identifiable object inside the deathstrip, it is a burnt electrical box full of bullet holes. I think it is probably necessary but has the air of a re-enacted afterthought. The most bothersome thing about this decision is the suggestion that in the future people might re-fabricate sections of the Berlin wall because the original pieces have almost all been destroyed. Rebuilding the Berlin Wall sound frightening to anyone else?