Check Point Charlie – Germany

In front of the Check Point Charlie is situated a museum that is as interesting as it is painful, the Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. Walking through its rooms we can see hundreds of pictures, documents, videos and many other objects related to the Berlin wall. It is specially touching to see the desperate and original ways used by some of the people from the Oriental Berlin, trying to escape from the communist side. Some crossed the borders inside suitcases or under the engine of vehicles. Many were successful, others died trying to escape. The memory of the years in which Berlin was dominated by the Soviet Union can still be felt in many points of the city, as for example the monument situated near the Brandenburg Gate.

Although it is a touristic attraction for those who go to Berlin, the truth is that the wall brings back many painful memories for the older inhabitants. That is why the people who live on the Bernauer Street struggled when they learned that the government didn’t plan to destroy the wall on this precise part.

There was built a memorial, called Gedenkstatte Berliner Mauer, using of one of the only sectors of the Berlin wall that remained intact. Also, a documentation center shows details of the history of the wall and the division of Germany. Which is also a part of the memorial of the Church of Reconciliation, built in 2000 in the same place where the original church was blown up by Communists in 1985.

The concept of the Gedenkstatte Berliner Mauer is truly surprising, so don’t expect to find there statues of such things. The monument consists of a rectangle made of wall on its four sides. One of the four walls is made of the remaining Berlin wall and the other three are new. There is no access to the interior of the rectangle. The space inside the four walls is a reminiscent stretch of the ‘Forbidden Area’, as was known the land and space just beside the Berlin wall.

Nowadays this empty rectangle represents a sad but eloquent witness of the black times of the Cold War, and the only way to see the empty space in the four wall rectangle is to go up the four floors of the documentation center building where there is a platform from which one can have a complete view of the lifeless rectangle, from where no one can enter or exit.