Contemplating the Berlin Wall

Regina Mönch likes the winning proposal for a Berlin Wall memorial on Bernauer Street, designed by Berlin architects Winkelmüller, Sinai, Faust and Fuchs. "Bernauer Street is really authentic, unlike other sites in the city which was cut off and walled-in for 28 years. The street is loaded with emblematic life stories like none other. All the world knows the case of the soldier, Schumann, who leapt to freedom over the freshly installed thickets of barbed-wire; the images of people tumbling from the windows of apartments on the eastern side of Bernauer Street into the waiting safety blankets of the West Berlin Fire Department; and maybe also the image of the dynamited Versöhnungskirche, the Church of Reconciliation, as it sank into a dusty cloud." The memorial will now turn almost the entire street into a place of remembrance, "to keep alive the memory of the topography of the wall-era, when Bernauer Street – uninhabitable and robbed of its identity - was the no-man's land of world history."

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