It is hard to imagine that it was only just over fifty five years ago that this was a normal neighbourhood in Berlin and now it´s one of the last places to see a tiny fraction of a percent of what the Berlin wall was, here at the Berlin wall memorial.
So although they´ve had to add a little bit of extra concrete on the outside here to preserve what´s left here of the Berlin wall, it is the original that was on the spot.The important thing to remember here though that this is really just a tiny, tiny fraction of what originally had surrounded pretty much all of West Berlin. And really, it´s weird that this used to be a normal street, just Bernauerstr.
„The authority of the Soviet Sector announce that today, Wednesday the 29th of December, between 11 a.m and 3 p.m, the building of Nr. 42 Ackerstraße will be blown up.“
Although the community buildings for the church were destroyed in 1965, the actual church building stayed in the middle of the death strip until 1985.You can see a bit of the floor plan laid out in the grass here until it was finally then demolished really only four years before the wall came down.
So when you look through the wall of what´s left of the death strip today, it´s interesting to remember that at the beginning of 1989 the head of East Germany said that the wall was going to last for another hundred years.
This wasn´t just a wall between two separated countries and two separated cities, but also the wall separated people from their jobs, separated friends and separated members of the same family.