BERLIN: AND THE WALL CAME DOWN

The Berlin Wall is now a memory--the physical evidence of the barrier between East and West has been removed.  The Wall and what it symbolized remains in photographs, history books, mementos--those pieces which have been torn down, hoarded, sold and bartered--and in people's consciousness. But as with most memories, it too will fade.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera recounts the 1968 Russian  invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, stating: "The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will forget what it is and what it was. The world will forget even faster."

A reunified Germany gave birth to a new sense of national pride along with a reconstruction program that burdened its economy for some time. Surely West Berliners felt a sense of freedom after living in a "walled-up" city for 28 years. The dominant effect will be on the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), which saw the opening of borders as an economic necessity.

I went to Berlin for the first time in April 1990, and again in October 1990. Initially I was struck with the most visible difference: a wealthy technologically advanced and cosmopolitan West, streets bursting with activity, lit by lamps, neon and traffic; and the East, dark, gray and economically depressed, streets empty and bordered with crumbled buildings and rubble from the World War II.

During my three-month stay in Berlin, I lived in the East, walked most every street, spoke with many people, all the time documenting the disparities, which go much deeper then the visual: a group of children rummage through a large trash container filled with discarded library books, published by the former GDR. A woman exclaims, "This is horrible. Just Horrible," She was not speaking of the abandonment of an ineffective political system, nor the closing of many East German government facilities and factories, nor the replacement of one culture with another, but of the unemployment in the East which necessitated children to become more enterprising.

Change evolved in a subtle and gradual manner. The culture of East Berlin's recent and past histories was still apparent. Skinheads' (a Neo-Nazi faction) marked territory with graffiti. The plethora of vacant buildings in the East offered a new 'market' for occupation. Mainzerstrasse, the site of a street battle, is fenced in by (West) German police allowing only (East) German residents of Mainzerstrasse entrance upon showing government-issued identification cards. A woman from the eastern sector engaged in a political dispute with a member of the left-wing Autonomen from the western sector, a demonstration in the Alexanderplatz against the German government's imperialistic policies. Her concerns are economic, his ideological.

Squatters wait for a government-backed eviction effort by the Berlin police force, while local East Berliners watch the confrontation, unaccustomed to this type of political activism. Many of the squatters--university students, dissidents, foreigners--came from the west when the wall opened in response to the housing crisis there and to initiate their own political activism. 

The photographs comprise a small visual record of an important historic episode.