THE BERLIN WALL

"Living with the Wall" - Matthias Hofmann, (English & German) nicolai, ISBN 3-87584-607-9

When the Berlin Wall was opened in 1989, everyone was taken by surprise. The DDR, East Germany, swiftly entered into negotiations with Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrats in the Federal Republic and a year later the Reunification of Germany was a political fait accomplis. There had been no real expectation of glasnost and perestroika leading to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, still less the sea change that saw government after government lose their authority and be replaced by reformed and more or less democratic regimes in country after country. In Europe, only Yugoslavia saw serious conflict, the tragic consequences of which will scar the Balkans for another generation. But the outcome could have been very different had the DRR government chosen violence to repress the mass demonstrations of popular dissent that heralded the end of communism. Had that violence erupted no-one would have expected the Federal 'West' Germans to intervene. Any intervention would have meant breaching the Berlin Wall and triggering a confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and the brink of nuclear war. Such was the powerful symbolism of the Berlin Wall as a key component of Cold War, as well as its banal function dividing the city.

For a generation, the Berlin Wall had symbolised the division of Europe between East and West at the end of World War II. For more than a decade before the Wall was constructed, Berlin had been run as a divided city by the four powers, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and United States, then in August 1961, the East German regime started to build the Wall, a perverse structure that would dominate the city for 28 years.

Little or nothing now remains to remind us the Wall ever existed. Checkpoint Charlie has been replaced by a group of uninteresting office buildings, none of the other checkpoints survive and only a line of metal studs in a busy road by the Brandenburg Gate show where the most familiar stretch of the Wall once stood. It is astonishing that a structure more than a 100 miles long has been almost completely erased from the cityscape. There are a few decorative concrete slabs near public buildings and a 'fake' section of commissioned graffiti on the side of a wharf in the former East, where there was no graffiti at all, but to all intents and purposes there is nothing left for the visitor to see.

'Living with the Wall', in English and German, provides a useful set of impressions of the everyday banality of the Wall during the nineteen eighties, when Berlin author and photographer, Matthias Hoffmann was a student of politics and took regular snapshots of the Wall in different places. The photographs reveal the scale of the wall as a series of zones, an outer wall, the patrol lanes and watch towers, trenches, concrete blocks and the onetime minefields of open ground. Hoffmann's archive of photographs can also be found on the internet at www.mauerfotos.de and should be a useful reminder for anyone about to visit Berlin of the sights that they will not be able to see.

The Wall was ugly, a rough and ready structure that emphasised the run down city's dowdyness. Clearly, the city wanted rid of the Wall, however the failure of imagination that allowed Berlin's most distinctive feature to be destroyed is another kind of symbol for the thinking that has accompanied German reunification.