![\"Gedenkst\u00e4tte](\"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/144\/2016\/04\/image-16-1024x427-300x125.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nAnother meet up with the group and get a tour day! So glad that we have all of these opportunities to visit these places around Berlin and see how they have preserved history. This tour was particularly interesting because of its specific implementation in the community. Before I get into this however, I want to briefly touch on the two documentaries we watched onsite directly before we engaged with the wall itself.<\/p>\n
The first of these documentaries showed us a look into how this wall came into formation and what was happening in the communities of citizens on both sides of the wall once it was in place. I was surprised to learn that the tensions between these superpowers of the GDR and the Allies known as the Cold War started a mere three years after the end of the Second World War. With this information alone I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a German citizen at the time. To have survived the War only to find yourself stuck between governments that have their own conflicts of interest could only have been maddening. It was only during the tour we were told that both sides put Nazi leaders in places of leadership simply because they knew the people and the situation best.<\/p>\n
The second film was a computer engineered reconstruction of both the Berlin Wall and the East\/West boarder that divided the country in half. It focused largely on the wall itself and each of the components were laid out in a series to show what it would have taken to be successful in crossing this boundary. Two walls on either side of a “death strip” also known as no-man’s land where there was any combination of trip wires, “Stalin’s Lawn” (a blanket of vertical iron rods laid out on a grid), anti tank barricades, barbed wire, guard towers, trip lights, land mines, etc. In various escape attempts or just misfortunate events, such as children falling into the river and drowning in no man’s land, the wall claimed a total of 136 lives.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
When we walked out into the light of day to look at this monument to the wall it was hard not to be immersed physically and emotionally in what this place meant. We walked along a portion of the wall that was reconstructed after it was torn down to show that liminal space between a world of capitalism and a world of communism. This was personally very hard for me to understand. It seemed a little perverted to build the wall again, in a place where this was a reality for residents who may still live in this neighborhood. This specific location was particularly hard hit with casualties because the gap between the two sides was so narrow. A church destroyed because it concealed a portion of the wall from view along the boarder, metal markers that represent the tunnels made to evacuate from East Berlin, faces of the victims(mainly young men, but some women and children as well) who fell at the wall, and finally a recreation of the death zone enclosed between two iron barriers. Even though the experience was sickening at times to contemplate, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the ingenuity and the general gumption of those who made it across. It wasn’t easy for them once they made it either; often bringing only a few belongings or nothing, often disowned by family members left behind, exiled from everything they knew it was certainly an isolated existence to stay or go.<\/p>\n
It is easy to look back and say well they just could have waited the 28 years the wall was in place and then had their freedom, but they were under the impression that this would always be the case. These are people being led by fascism that took advantage of a desperate time to fortify its own standings. I can only imagine the palpable insanity of the situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another meet up with the group and get a tour day! So glad that we have all of these opportunities to visit these places around Berlin and see how they have preserved history. This tour was particularly interesting because of… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3189,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"geo":{"latitude":52.5350533,"longitude":13.3901901,"description":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3189"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ofbloodandbeauty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}