‘It has to go away, but at the same time it has to be kept’: the Berlin Wall and the making of an urban icon

Abstract

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.Uwe Johnson

Urban space, political identity and the unwanted legacies of state socialism: Bucharest's problematic Centru Civic in the post-socialist era

“…Berlin is often regarded as an exemplar of this approach (e.g. Cochrane 2006;Colomb 2007;Ladd 1997;Molnar 2010;Schlor 2006;Staiger 2009;Till 2005;Weszkalnys 2007). Much of the post-socialist development of Berlin has been founded on a normative model of a stereotypical "European city" and the inspiration for remaking Berlin was derived from the city's pre-socialist past and was thus an attempt at the '''normalization' of a European city centre in architectural terms" (Colomb 2007, 298).…”

“…Cochrane notes the continuity of buildings built by the Nazi and Communist regimes which have undergone internal and external renovation but are still used as government offices. As Schlor (2006) suggests, the Berlin Wall has all but completely been removed but traces remain, often circulating as heritage tourism, and its memory has been made into an "urban icon". Weszkalnys traces the post-1989 history of Berlin's Alexanderplatz, noting how debates around this former socialist showpiece problematized any smooth transition of the built environment into a symbol of the new Germany.…”