It's strange - about two blocks west of the intersection where
checkpoint charlie was there is also a fairly long section of the wall
left in place, and all through the city, cobblestones mark the path
that the wall once took. At the Brandenburg gate, the semicircle
where the wall was is marked like that and there are embedded signs in
a couple of places with the dates the wall went up and came down.
Len Nadybal
--- In
BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, "Bill Hanrahan" <hanrahan@k...>
wrote:
> Mar 16, 2003
>
> Missing Berlin Wall Touches off Dispute Over Desolate Checkpoint Charlie
> By Stephen Graham
> Associated Press Writer
>
> BERLIN (AP) - Trekking south across Berlin, the young overseas
tourist never even noticed what used to be the world's most famous
border crossing.
> "Where's the Berlin Wall?" said Deborah Knott, a 22-year-old student
from Melbourne, Australia, lifting her sunglasses for a better look at
the vacant, sandy plot where the Cold War frontier post of Checkpoint
Charlie once stood.
>
> "It's a bit disappointing. We thought there'd be a bit of the wall
that you could touch," she said.
>
> That dismay goes to the heart of a new struggle at the former
checkpoint where U.S. and Soviet tanks faced off at the height of
east-west tension. Now, a property developer and a local museum are in
a growing dispute over how to keep its history alive.
>
> Pieces of the wall still stand at several points in the city,
including at a somber memorial to the victims of communist repression.
A 1,400-yard section along the Spree River has been preserved for the
colorful graffiti sprayed by artists from around the world after the
Wall fell in 1989.
>
> But Berlin's 6 million annual visitors are often left scratching
their heads when they look for the gray concrete barrier that once
snaked 23 miles through residential streets, across a bombed-out no
man's land and past the Brandenburg Gate.
>
> Often there were two parallel walls, with watchtowers, armed guards
and dogs to catch anyone fleeing across what became known as the
"death strip" in between.
>
> Nowadays, Checkpoint Charlie features a reproduction of the guard
house once manned by U.S. soldiers, complete with sandbag defenses and
the tall white sign declaring: "You are now leaving the American sector."
>
> But the guard house, as well as big photographs of a Russian and a
U.S. soldier, are marooned on a traffic island and easily overlooked
on bustling Friedrichstrasse avenue, revived as an upscale shopping
street after Germany reunited in 1990.
>
> A privately run Wall museum has campaigned for wall sections to be
taken out of storage and returned to the site, now owned by a property
developer who bought it from the city government.
>
> The museum claims the developer promised to devote space in a
planned new office building to a Wall memorial.
>
> Instead, frustration turned to outrage this month - also for
neighborhood businesses - after stalls and tents offering souvenirs
and fast food appeared on the site.
>
> Developer Abraham Rosenthal said his IdealWert company still intends
to build the office complex. But he said the Berlin property market
was too weak for the project for the foreseeable future - hence the
decision to rent out the plot for the stalls.
>
> "The plans have not changed, but you can't go against the real
estate market," Rosenthal said.
>
> "It's a disgrace," said Alexandra Hildebrandt of the House at
Checkpoint Charlie museum, which documents how almost 1,000 East
Germans died trying to reach the West during the Cold War, including
230 at the Wall. Many were shot by patrolling East German soldiers.
>
> "This place symbolizes freedom for all the citizens of the world,"
said Hildebrandt. "In a place where you can feel human blood and
suffering, you can't put on a circus like this."
>
> The museum has urged the city government to buy back the site and
put up a replica of the top half of the Statue of Liberty as well as
wall sections, and maybe a statue of ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
>
> The proposal appears doomed - Berlin is deep in debt. But some
officials and politicians have sympathy for other ideas: renaming a
nearby subway station Checkpoint Charlie and naming the disputed plot
Checkpoint Charlie Square.
>
> With Germany and the United States at odds over Iraq, the
conservative opposition in city hall says it wants to focus attention
on how the United States defended then West Berlin and West Germany
during the Cold War.
>
> "Germans could be more grateful for what the United States did for
us" after World War II, one local conservative lawmaker told a recent
protest meeting in the museum. "That gratitude should be made clearer
here."
>
>
>
> Bill Hanrahan
> email: hanrahan@k...
> personal web site: http://users.kua.net/~hanrahan/