Posted on 07/06/2005 8:09:30 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Locals and tourists watched in dismay Tuesday as workers pulled up wooden crosses and ripped out a reconstructed section of the Berlin Wall, fulfilling a court order to dismantle a private memorial to people killed at the East German border.
Bailiffs and workers arrived at dawn to take down the memorial erected by owners of the nearby Checkpoint Charlie museum. The owners had refused to remove it after their lease on the land expired in December.
"Where are the Berliners?" asked 59-year-old resident Wilfried Gordan, among the scattered crowd that watched in the rain as a crane prepared to move a slab of the notorious barrier. "It's such a disgrace. There should be 100,000 people out here in protest today."
"Today, they have shot the dead a second time," added Berlin's Burkhardt Sach, 52. "It's a joke, and it stinks."
Museum owners built the memorial in October, using original sections to reconstruct a stretch of wall next to 1,065 crosses -- their tally of those who died at communist East Germany's fortified border.
They had leased the land from the Hamm-based BAG Bank, which sued to have it vacated after the lease expired. The museum failed to come up with the necessary $43 million to purchase the plot.
As work started Tuesday, museum director Alexandra Hildebrandt confronted a group of police: "Do you really want to defend this process?" she asked to no reply.
Workers in yellow raincoats unscrewed the crosses from their pedestals before carrying them away one by one. The crane hauled away the pieces of wall, which the museum had brought out of storage for the memorial.
Several hundred protesters jeered and whistled as the work began. Four men briefly chained themselves to crosses but unchained themselves after police spoke to them.
"It's too late now for a solution," Hildebrandt said.
The checkpoint was established by the US Army in 1961 after East Germany closed its border and later that year was the scene of a dramatic face-off between US and Soviet tanks.
It became the main crossing where foreign tourists, diplomats and military personnel entered and left the Soviet sector of the divided city, with multilingual signs warning: "You are leaving the American sector."
The memorial lay in what is now a high-rent shopping district. The adjacent Checkpoint Charlie museum -- established in 1963 on the West German side of the border and Berlin's second-busiest with 700,000 visitors last year -- is not in jeopardy.
Hildebrandt's memorial had drawn a mixed response in Berlin. The wall remnants used did not originally stand at the site, and the monument did not recreate how Checkpoint Charlie looked before the wall fell in 1989.
Mark Sadler, a 36-year-old Scottish artist living in Berlin, questioned whether crosses were an appropriate commemoration of the various victims of communist-era repression.
"It's a little theatrical," he said, watching the crosses being removed. "As a gesture it's appropriate, but it's temporary -- for me it's always felt very subjective, and a subjective memorial is a contradiction in terms."
A few sections of the Berlin Wall still stand in their original locations as reminders of the barrier, which snaked around the 103-mile perimeter of West Berlin, with about 27 miles running through the center of the city.
An official memorial to the victims, which includes a piece of the wall, opened in 1998 on Bernauer Strasse, a residential street that was the scene of spectacular East German escape attempts.
Hildebrandt, however, maintains that the wall should be remembered at Checkpoint Charlie and rules out re-erecting the memorial elsewhere. She said she would continue trying to buy the site and will keep the crosses in storage.
By afternoon, half the field of crosses had been removed and a bulldozer was obliterating all traces of its presence.
"It's a real shame that for those more than 1,000 victims there will no longer be any central memorial," said Wolfdietrich Peiker, 20, a Humboldt University student whose parents fled East Germany.
"When someone sees those crosses in front of a wall, one understands immediately what it means."
American Reuben Doetsch, visiting from Chicago with his high-school German class, said it was "sad for Berlin."
"It's part of the city and the history," the 15-year-old said. "I think it takes away the spirit of the wall."
I looked into this one a couple days ago. It's not *the* Checkpoint Charlies museum, with the gates and such. It is another Checkpoint Charlie memorial, with crosses with picture of those shot crossing.
It's a nice memorial, and it's a shame it is getting taken out, but it's not like there won't be the real thing around as a reminder a few blocks away.
I've seen it. I'll never forget it.
well you have to keep in mind that it was torn down becaue the city is run by an alliance of the communist and socialist parties. The commented that it looked too much like a holocaust memorial and was too somber. One of them commented that the comparios of communism to nazism was inappropriate.
This is not the same as eminent domain. The bank owned the property and had leased it out. When the lease was up they wanted to sell it and asked the previous leasees to remove the stuff they had installed on the property. They wouldn't so the bank did. Nothing unlawful taking place here.
The comparison of Communism to Nazism is inappropriate. As horrible as the Nazis were, at least 10X as many people died under Communism.
Communism was much worse.
So there is an ACLU chapter over there?
Of course, you are absolutely right. I was just thinking, though, of "the greater good" principle, which appears to have won out over what should have been a protected historical location. If it isn't "sacred, hallowed land," then it's pretty close, because of those who died in a hail of communist E. German bullets, just trying to get out of that vicious system.
Char
I see a certain irony in someone wanting to use someone else's private property (in this case the bank's) for free and against the owner's will to protest communism.
I see your point, and it is well taken. However, I don't believe that the primary purpose was so much to "protest Communism" as to honor those many who perished trying to escape it.
It is true, however, that the people desiring to maintain the tribute don't have any right to do as they please with it, if it isn't their property. I agree with that, but it is still a bit sad........sort of as though for some reason a bank were to be constructed at Ground Zero.
I am already mortified with this new "International Freedom Center" (IFC) concept, which I dearly and desperately hope is finally abandonned for the anti-American, marxist propaganda project that it clearly is.
Char
Coarse. Crass.
What would you expect from the people who hosted the Holocaust?
"...the comparison of communism to Nazism is inappropriate..."
I'll say! And unecessary, too, because they're identical. A tyrant is a tyrant.
"...Nothing unlawful going on here..."
Yes, and there was nothing unlawful about anything that Hitler and the Third Reich did, either. He made sure that everything was within the law, to insure the appearance of propriety.
C Co, 2nd Bn 6th US Inf Div.
Berlin Brigade
1982-1985
WOW! Let me see how this issue just went from property rights to Hitler. Must be the Gizmo to Nazi mentality.
If I were in charge, I would also build museums at Checkpoint Alpha (Helmstedt) and Checkpoint Bravo (Dreilinden).
Times change and people change, but the Berliners who lived through the events of 1945, 1948, and 1961, appreciated the USA.
The Germans want to forget the Holocaust and the don't care much about the Cold War. Realize that 1/3 of them were on the "other" side. Some may not see things the way we do. Even the Berlin Airlift is just a piece of some past. They don't really relate, appreciate nor care about these things. Most driving by the Frankfurt Airport have no idea why there even is a C47 sitting there in a little park.
Checkpoint Charlie is just another piece of some old past they really don’t care about (For the most part).
Red6
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