Berlin marks 55 years since Wall was built

Berlin Mayor Michael Müller led a wreath-laying ceremony Saturday at the Bernauer Street memorial, where the last remains of the Berlin Wall still stand 55 years after first being erected by communist East Germany.

Alex Klausmeier, who heads the Berlin Wall Memorial Foundation, spoke at the ceremony of the importance of the site in promoting critical historical insight after he had lamented knowledge gaps among present-day German students.

He told the "Berliner Zeitung" (BZ) newspaper Saturday that his foundation's seminars with pupils showed repeatedly that their awareness of East Germany's negation of democracy was often "further away" than their knowledge of ancient Pompeii, the Roman city buried in volcanic ash in AD 79.

The seminars therefore had to include fundamental teachings on democracy - freedom of expression and division of powers between the legislative, judiciary and executive, said Klausmeier. He is a professor of cultural history who has published a series of books on how the Wall is remembered.

On August 13, 1961, as the Cold War deepened, former Soviet-run East Germany (GDR) began erecting the 155-kilometer-long wall, turning US, British and French sectors of West Berlin effectively into an island separated from the then West Germany and connected only via tightly patrolled transit corridors.

At least 138 people died trying to escape over the Wall and its East German fortifications until the fall of the East German regime in November 1989.

Marienborn transit site also remembered

A similar ceremony also took place Saturday at Marienborn - on a key route between Berlin and Hannover - where the GDR regime once ran its largest transit facility along the more than 1,100 kilometers of fortified fence (683 miles) dividing East and West Germany.

Reiner Haseloff, the premier of Saxony-Anhalt state, said Saturday he hoped more visitors would come to Marienborn with an "alert eye" for the past and present-day.

Marienborn lies close to Helmstadt, once a key reception center in Lower Saxony state in former West Germany.

Awareness lacking

From his foundation's office overlooking the Bernauer Street site, Klausmeier told the BZ that it was gratifying that one million tourists, many of them young, visited the Berlin Wall memorial each year to learn about the fate of its former victims.

Asked by the BZ why youth should bother long-term, Klausmeier replied that the foundation not only had the task of documenting the "concrete historical events" involving the Wall and its fall, but also to remind youth about democracy.

"What we experience time and again in our seminars with male and female pupils is that there is hardly any or no knowledge and even awareness of what the difference is between a democracy and a dictatorship," he said.

"Many have heard the term Stasi [former East German secret police] from time to time, but they have little to no knowledge about the political persecution by the SED [the-then ruling communist party], the absence of division of powers or the lack of freedom of expression in the GDR," Klausmeier said.

Astonishment over phraseology

Europe's recent inflow of asylum seekers and the erection of new fences by nations such as Hungary led often to astonishing discussions with students, Klausmeier said.

During the Cold War the word "escape helper" had had a positive connotation when it referred to West Berliners who dug tunnels to help East Germans flee.

"Today, pupils take [this term] to mean criminals who take money to cram war refugees from Syria into a truck and who don't care whether those persons are suffocated," he said.

Drawing historical comparisons

Klausmeier said his team used the current situation to draw "historical links" to what millions of East German citizens experienced; fleeing, arriving and integrating into the Federal Republic of Germany.

Currently, another memorial site overseen by the foundation, the Marienfelde Refugee Center in what was the south of former West Berlin, was housing 700 refugees from Syria, he said.

Between 1949 and 1990, 1.3 million East Germans fled through Marienfelde and received residency permits for West Germany.

ipj/jm (epd, dpa)