Katja Heinemann

berlin / work in progress

“It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.”

Twenty years after mass celebrations at the Berlin Wall signaled to people all over the world the end of the cold war, the "Wall in people's heads" remains, just as German author Peter Schneider had prophesized in his 1982 novel The Wall Jumper.

Since 1989, a generation of young Germans has come of age without lasting memories of life in communist East Germany, yet a powerful sense of separation remains lodged in the country’s collective consciousness. Significant income and unemployment gaps persist between the two German halves, and as some regions of the former East are left behind economically, people there still feel like second-class citizens. The notion that their country vanished, gobbled up by its larger capitalist sibling, creates a powerful sense of nostalgia dubbed Ostalgie, a word play on the German word for East.

This Berlin travel reportage sets out to document the commercialization of these nostalgic longings via an Ostalgie marketing industry, as well as the serious commemoration of victims of the former East German regime and the burgeoning revisionist movement of those who seek to whitewash its history.

Germans again find themselves torn between the opposing forces of wanting to forget and dutifully memorializing. Some results can be quite tone deaf: the razing of the Palace of the Republic. Others have created high-minded civic institutions: The Bernauer Strasse Wall Monument, the Hohenschönhausen Stasi Jail memorial. Often, they are driven by profit: Trabi Tours, a GDR-themed hotel, selling mass produced replicas of East Berlin symbols. And sometimes they are bound to offend: a Stasi themed bar.

The monument is dedicated to the at least 136 East Germans who died when trying to escape to West Berlin. Many were shot by border guards, while others drowned in the city's canals.
   
Tearing down a symbolic former East Berlin landmark to rebuild the Prussian castle that had stood at its site before being destroyed in WWII.
   
Vendors are hawking communist memorabilia near the ruins of the former East Berlin parliamentary building and cultural center.
     
  
Though mocked as pompous and ugly during GDR times, the Palace of the Republic came to symbolize its era, and especially East Berliners take offense at the decision to raze it.
   
Located in the central Berlin Mitte neighborhood, Bernauer Strasse's buildings stood on the dividing line between East and West. Ten people were killed at this stretch of the inner German border.
   
A plaque dedicated to the oldest known victim of the wall, an eighty year old woman who jumped out of the window of her Bernauer Strasse apartment to reach West Berlin.
     
  
Interrogation room. Initially a Soviet prison, the complex served as East Germany's main secret service jail from 1951 to 1989, housing untold numbers of political prisoners.
   
Serving as tour guide, former dissident Matthias Melster recounts his experiences as one of the last people who were jailed for trying to escape to the West in 1987.
   
Interrogation room. The Stasi's methods of psychological intimidation and coercion employed at this facility were portrayed in the recent movie The Lives Of Others.
     
  
Tourists pay 1 Euro per photo to pose with actors dressed as Allied soldiers and military police.
   
As the border crossing for allied military and diplomats, Checkpoint Charlie became the most famous of eight border posts linking East and West Berlin.
   
A popular tourist attraction offers Berlin visitors the chance to drive original East German Trabant cars, one of two car models built in the GDR.
     
  
While some East Germans experience a nostalgic longing for certain lost aspects of GDR culture, for most Westerners the East has been reduced to a cheap joke.
   
Though much collected, Trabants are banned from EU cities due to stringent pollution controls. The Safaris operate under an exception, so theirs are the only Trabis you will encounter in Berlin.
   
An exhibition of GDR state sponsored art includes Norbert Wagenbrett's critical series on the Soviet Revolution from 1990.
     
  
A Stasi-themed bar near the former headquarters of the GDR secret police in the Lichtenberg neighborhood. Its slogan exhorts: Come to our place - or we'll come to yours.
   
Typical East Berlin Plattenbau highrise architecture, now restored and freshly painted.
   
At the Ostel reception desk , clocks show the time in Berlin, Havana, Moscow and Beijing.
     
  
Daniel Helbig and Guido Sand, owners of the GDR-themed hostel
   
Located near Alexanderplatz in Berlin Mitte, the museum attemps to fit the forty year history of a vanished country into a 4,000 sq.f. museum.
   
A young visitor listens to the recording of an enthusiastic male voice recounting in the East German dialect how his application for home telephone service has finally been approved.
     
  
A Trabi on display at the museum is one of the key attractions.
   
Mondos Arts in the Lichtenberg neighborhood specializes in selling GDR memorabilia: household items, movies, and this cd compilation featuring songs of the FDJ youth organization.
   
Near the former Bornholmerstrasse border crossing, the first checkpoint that opened on the night of November 9, 1989, officially marking the end of the East German regime.
     
  
Tourists photograph the most famous stretch of the Berlin Wall, now dominated by a sign for new corporate-sponsored sports arena.
  
A documentation center presents a history outline of the Berlin Wall to visitors. Mauer is the German word for the Wall.
   
The Chapel of Reconciliation was built to honor the victims of the Berlin Wall. A church had stood at its place in the center of the death strip until it was torn down in 1985.