The Wall Museum Berlin
The Wall Museum shows the history of the Wall and the decades-long division of the world into East and West. The museum is located on the Berlin Wall in the former death strip at the East Side Gallery in the immediate vicinity of the Oberbaumbrücke border station .
The history of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War and the era of German division from 1961 to 1990 are presented in a permanent exhibition at The Wall Museum . The presentation is based on the personal contributions of contemporary witnesses, victims and political decision-makers, and shows how the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful revolution came about in 1989 .
The opening of the museum was announced by Mikhail Gorbachev on November 7, 2014 and took place in March 2016.
prehistory
The initiator of The Wall Museum is the German producer Jaka Bizilj from Slovenia .
In October 2015 the public got to see a preview of The Wall Museum in temporary buildings, at which the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was the first visitor to sign an element of the Berlin Wall, followed by the Bethke brothers, who one after the other with an air mattress over water Winch over the wall and a microlight through the air from the former GDR had fled.
The opening took place in the historic Mühlenspeicher at Easter 2016. Guests included Günter Wetzel, who fled across the border in a hot air balloon, the singer of the Scorpions and creator of the unofficial fall of the Berlin hymn " Wind of Change ", Klaus Meine , and the museum curators Guido Knopp and Jürgen Ast.
The welcome address in the museum was provided by Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he refers to the situation of an impending atomic Third World War at the time .
Location
The location of the museum is at Mühlenstraße 78 in the former Mühlenspeicher in Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district on the banks of the Spree . The roof of the Mühlenspeicher was used as a border watchtower in GDR times.
exhibition
The permanent exhibition is divided into 13 themed rooms and deals with the prehistory of the construction of the Wall from 1945, the construction of the Wall itself, the division of Germany in the everyday life of the population, the Cold War up to German reunification and the day the Wall fell on November 9, 1989.
The exhibition commemorates the victims of the Berlin Wall. The exact dates and places of death will be published. On the balcony of the museum with a view of the Spree are listed the names of children who drowned in sight because no one rescued them from the border strip.
One focus is on film presentations in the original, audio-visual reports from eyewitnesses and the personal contributions of the political actors responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification (including the last President of the Soviet Union , Mikhail Gorbatschow, the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher , the Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Németh and the US Secretary of State James Baker ).
The curators' interlocutors included the Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl , who was responsible for reunification , his predecessor Willy Brandt , who was responsible for the policy of détente and the Warsaw knee-jerk , leading civil rights activists from the former GDR and Arpad Bella , who was the first refugees to pass through in Sopron , Hungary and Harald Jäger , who opened the first border crossing on Bornholmer Strasse on November 9, 1989 .
The exhibition includes contributions from artists such as Roger Waters (The Wall) and Leonardo DiCaprio to David Bowie , who composed the song “ Heroes ” on the Berlin Wall, and Keith Haring , who painted the Berlin Wall with his famous “stick figures”.
In addition to historical facts, the museum also focuses on the human stories of the division of Europe. Stanislaw Petrov , for example, describes how he saved the world from nuclear war in 1983 by not responding to a false alarm with a nuclear counter-attack, as protocol would have required.
The exhibits include u. a. a pram with which the trains coming from Prague to West Germany were to be stopped on the track on October 1, 1989, a leaflet from the Leipzig pastor Christian Führer , with the request to be peaceful during the Monday demonstrations , and a copy of a defibrillator , such as Hans-Dietrich Genscher took him with him after his second heart attack in New York , when, under massive pressure , he negotiated the release of the refugees in the Prague embassy at the end of September 1989. A VHS video that was lost for 25 years is being shown in The Wall Museum . Genscher had decided not to broadcast it on television so as not to snub the negotiating partners on the east side.
assignment
The museum has given itself the task of telling the story of the wall from beginning to end and making a contribution to overcoming walls in the future.
The exhibition closes with the European anthem “Ode to Joy - All People Become Brothers” and Mikhail Gorbachev's vision of the fate of humanity in the 21st century: “The XXI century will be a Century either of total all-embracing crisis or of moral and spiritual healing that will reinvigorate humankind. It is my conviction that all of us - all reasonable political leaders, all spiritual and ideological movements, all faiths - must help in this transition to a triumph of humanism and justice, in making the XXI century a century of a new human renaissance. "
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Scorpions singer Meine opens new wall museum - Berliner Morgenpost
- ↑ Katja Iken: From the GDR to the West: Three Brothers, Three Escape Stories . In: Spiegel Online . May 23, 2014 ( spiegel.de [accessed May 29, 2018]).
- ↑ Günter Wetzel: Escape with a hot air balloon from the former GDR. Retrieved May 29, 2018 .
- ↑ Ast, Jürgen ›German Television Award 2018. Accessed on May 29, 2018 (German).
- ↑ Thomas Loy: Wall Museum number four opens . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . March 24, 2016, ISSN 1865-2263 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed May 30, 2018]).
- ↑ The Wall Museum opened at the East Side Gallery . In: Berlin Week . ( berliner-woche.de [accessed on May 30, 2018]).
- ↑ Peter Zander: Harald Jäger is the man who opened the wall . ( Morgenpost.de [accessed on May 29, 2018]).
- ↑ Stefan Locke: TV review "Train to freedom": There was bare fear . In: FAZ.NET . September 30, 2014, ISSN 0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 29, 2018]).
- ^ Johanna Lutteroth: Genscher on the Prague balcony: "... that today your departure has become possible" . In: Spiegel Online . April 1, 2016 ( spiegel.de [accessed May 29, 2018]).
- ↑ Genscher on the fall of the wall: sober, unadorned, no triumph . ( handelsblatt.com [accessed on May 29, 2018]).
- ^ The International foundation for socio-economic and political studies (The Gorbachev Foundation). Retrieved May 29, 2018 .