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Twenty years ago Willy Brandt, the former mayor of West Berlin and the chancellor of Germany, spoke to a crowd outside Schoneberg City Hall the day after the Berlin Wall fell. He urged his listeners to preserve part of the wall "as a reminder of a historical monstrosity." His concern, he went on to say, was that without a reminder, young people would not understand the chain of events that led to the building of the wall - the rise of the Nazis, the war, the division of purpose and power among the victors.
The wall itself was an act of desperation.
After World War II, Germany was initially split into four sectors occupied by the Americans, the Soviets, the French, and the British. By 1949, however, tensions between the Soviet Union and the other three allies divided the country into two - an East Germany supported by the communist Soviets, and West Germany, backed by the western powers.
Stuck far within the Soviet sector of Germany, Berlin was also split in two. Unlike the rest of Germany which was separated by a fortified border, Berlin itself was under military control - and people could travel through the checkpoints with relative ease.
By 1961 the East German government decided to stop the mass exodus of people fleeing the economic hardships and state repression by building the Wall, and travel back and forth between the east and west ended.
Twenty years after the Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Berliners are preparing to celebrate the end of the Cold War with music, speeches, and a symbolic toppling of large styrofoam dominos set in place where the Wall once stood. Until now, however, they have been more hesitant to acknowledge the part the Wall played in their history. Despite Brandt's worry about misunderstanding history without a memorial, Germans quickly and efficiently removed almost all of the 110 kilometer-long division between the east and the west.
This summer when I visited Berlin, I looked for the Wall and had trouble finding it. Except for a two-block long section in what was once East Berlin, the Wall has been reduced to square cobblestones set in the pavement. Most are unmarked and look like the ubiquitous bike lane markings that separate the pedestrians from the riders on the wide city sidewalks.
"Memorials and memorial sites in a democracy need to grow, need to ripen and need a public understanding to evolve over time and gain acceptance," Rainer Klempke told The Washington Post. As the person in charge of many of Berlin's historical sites, Klempke recognizes an important fact about not only the Wall but about many other tourist destinations in Germany.
"The problem that we have," Klempke said, "and what makes it very difficult in contrast to, say, the Mall in Washington, is that we're not commemorating our victories. We're commemorating our acts of shame."
Yet Germans have resolutely faced the memories of shameful actions in the past. Close to a section of the embedded Wall stones is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a 19,000-square-meter rolling field covered with dark gray concrete rectangles called stelae. Varying in height from a few inches to almost 16 feet and tilted slightly out of kilter, the stelae often block a walker's view - indeed, when I walked through them, I felt the same sensation I feel when I walk through unfamiliar woods alone or when I use an ATM at dusk - claustrophobic and uneasy.
Peter Eisenmann, the American architect who designed the memorial, intended just this reaction.
"The enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate... Our memorial attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia... We can only know the past today through a manifestation in the present," he wrote in his project proposal.
Separating memory from nostalgia isn't always easy. One reason Berliners have been reluctant to create more obvious memorials to the Wall is the nostalgia that some Germans have for it. In the years since Reunification, Germans have coined a term - mauer im kopf or "Wall in the head" - to describe the sense that life before the Wall fell was better than it is now.
That's not surprising. Memories change as we change, or our interpretation of them changes. And as Willy Brandt suggested, every generation has to learn anew about the historical monstrosities we would prefer to forget.
One such place is Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp closest to Berlin. Markers show the location of the prisoners' barracks, the execution grounds, the crematorium. But most startling of all, the camp is in the middle of a quiet neighborhood where linden trees in the backyards of family homes drop their leaves over the wall of the camp. Ordinary people once lived outside those walls while ordinary people died within.
Half a century later, a new generation of Neo-Nazis tried to burn down the camp museum. More than anything else, their actions prove our ambivalence about memorials - and about our ability to deny a painful past even while we are shamed by it.
