opposite page: your own piece of history on a postcard. below: a section of the wall near Potsdamer Platz: the Trabant, the dove of peace and a call to remember history.
Shortly after the fall of the wall, selling its pieces, especially those with visible traces of graffiti, was very successful – buying a piece of the wall meant taking home a piece of German history. However, these pieces may represent more than a fragment of the wall; they can be considered a collective memory of what happened in Berlin. Through the wall’s elevation to a historical monument partially through its status as an artwork and mostly owing to its demolition, the Berlin Wall has been transformed from a symbol of the Cold War into its complete opposite, a symbol for overcoming differences and an icon representing peace. In the process of opening new construction sites, the authorities could possibly demolish the remaining fragments of the original wall. Soon we may no longer see the object that changed the lives of so many, that separated not only countries and ideologies, but more importantly families and lovers, just by its mere existence. It will become history in the word’s most literal meaning. 1 Scattering its pieces as widely as possible (one per tourist, coming from anywhere in the world), makes it impossible to actually rebuild this wall. As long as sellers do not run out of wall fragments (how they do not is a mystery since large parts were exported and others were used in road construction), such a small piece of painted concrete sitting in your far-away house is not just a souvenir of Berlin but is also part of the dismantling of the Cold War. People who buy pieces of the Berlin wall take an active role in its deconstruction and may as well help in overcoming other, still existing barriers. Long after the complete disappearance of the wall from Berlin, with its memory dissolved in history, little pieces all over the world will collectively remind more people of its former existence than if it had remained on site. We therefore strongly encourage anyone to buy a piece of an amalgamation of history, art and peace. Is the piece you bought genuine? Doesn’t matter. With all the ambiguity and ambivalence of all walls, it is the concept that is important not the actual material. C
1 A Deutsche Welle TV documentary on the Berlin Wall can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwQsTzGkbiY
Açalya Allmer studied architecture at the Middle East Technical University and did her PhD in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. At present, she is an Assistant Professor at Dokuz Eylül University in Turkey. Jens Allmer was born and raised in West Germany and had chance to pass the wall twice in the 1980s and several times after its fall. He teaches bioinformatics at the Izmir Institute of Technology.
WAR matters: On Site review 22
49
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator