The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (41 page)

But for others, paint seemed like weak punishment. The people took their hammers and chisels, their sledgehammers and crowbars, and they went to the Wall. Berlin in winter is a city of extraordinary echoes, particularly at night, and people didn’t sleep much in those days. The pecking of metal against concrete echoed down the dark, treeless streets of the city center, and those who chipped away at the
Wall that had contained them became known as the
Mauerspechte
, the “wall woodpeckers.”

The
Mauerspechte
were destroying the Wall in anger, but they did not discard their peckings. Many of them carefully collected, cataloged, and bagged their fragments. Sometimes they set up little stalls and sold their harvest to wandering tourists, complete with hastily contrived certificates of authenticity. Others hired their home tools out to visitors, who could then proudly display their bag of chips and honestly say that they had helped bring down the Berlin Wall. Some, like Volker Pawlowski, were more ambitious.

All over the world there are tiny pieces of the Berlin Wall, hoarded and revered as if they were fragments of something awesome and numinous. The Japanese ceramicist Tokusen Nishimura once ground a chunk of the Wall into dust, mixed it with clay, and fashioned it into a vessel for the solemn tea ceremonies of Kyoto. The writer Araminta Matthews recounts the tale of a piece of the Wall that was passed from Berlin to lover to lover to her—until she offered it to her intended, and he, not understanding its significance, handed it back. Reader, she dumped him.

Six months after the opening of the Wall, the East German government itself joined the ranks of the Wall profiteers. At a gala event at the Metropole Palace Hotel in Monaco, the Antifascist Protection Rampart was auctioned off to help pay the debts accumulated by the Socialist Workers’ Paradise it had been built to protect. Three hundred and sixty chunks of the Wall were photographed and listed in a glossy catalog, with the provenance of each fragment carefully noted. Pieces covered with beautiful graffiti fetched particularly high bids.

The Wall can now be found in a bewildering array of locations: the CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., the campus of Honolulu Community College in Hawaii, the urinals in the Main Street Station Hotel in Las Vegas. A slab of Grenzmauer 75 adorns the piazza of the small Italian hill town of Albinea, and another decorates a children’s playground at Trelleborg in Sweden. A segment of the Wall in Moscow carries the graffiti “BER.” The “LIN” is on a separate slab in Riga, Latvia.

As the bidding was going on in Monaco, bulldozers returned to the ruins in Berlin and resumed their work. It took them about four
months to clear away what was left. (Most of it was ground down into the rubble that now lies under the roads that reconnected Berlin to itself.) Then, three months after the auction of its border rampart, the German Democratic Republic reached the end of its own history. In October 1990 it abolished itself and ceased to exist.

U
TE DIDN’T STAY
with her sister for too long; their reunion wasn’t what she had expected it to be. Her sister looked drawn and nervous. She still had nightmares, she said, about what the border guards had done when they’d caught her. She told the same torture stories as Ute: there had been the pool of freezing water, the humiliating exercise with the mirror, the cries echoing down the corridor. She suffered from terrible migraines, too. But the government of the German Democratic Republic had treated Ute’s sister to one additional debasement. They had sold her: she had been dumped in West Germany in exchange for hard currency, along with a load of dissidents and criminals. The police had packed her on her way with a warning. “Our agents are everywhere,” they said. “Keep your trap shut, or what happened to you will happen to everyone in your family.”

Ute didn’t stay with her sister, but she didn’t go back to Berlin either. Like the fragments of the Wall, she went off to discover the world and make her fortune.

I
N THE PRESENT-DAY
happily ever after, Jacqueline Röber is a community councillor and a lawyer who lives and works at one end of Bernauerstrasse. Röber is an expert on property law—something of a burning issue in a neighborhood like hers, where rents were capped at GDR prices until the pressures of gentrification blew the Berlin housing market wide open. A child of the East zone, Röber didn’t expect much from the newly unified Germany, and although she’s done well for herself she hasn’t forgotten her roots. These days, she is an advocate for the erstwhile citizens of her vanished nation.

Her campaigning has led her into direct confrontation with another inheritor of the same legacy. When Germany was reunified and the state railway corporations of the East and the West were merged,
a company called Vivico was established to run the railways’ extensive property portfolio. It has since become a major player in the German real estate market.

Once upon a time, decades before the Wall, there had been a railway station at the end of Bernauerstrasse. The railway tracks divided the inner districts of the city in two: to the west was Wedding, to the east Prenzlauerberg. The station was flattened in the war, and Hagen Koch’s line ran between the two districts along the center of the deserted railway tracks. As the Wall grew, the tracks to the east disappeared beneath concrete and sand and barbed wire, while a makeshift labyrinth of private gardens was planted over them to the west. Everyone forgot that there had ever been a railway station in No Man’s Land, or that the area had belonged to anybody in the first place.

After the
Mauerspechte
and the bulldozers had done their work, there was nothing left of the Wall—nothing apart from nothing, that is. And with the border guards no longer tending No Man’s Land, the ground began to bloom with the pigeons of the plant kingdom: purple mallow, lilac, yellow goldenrod, and all those other scruffy, colorful species that thrive on abandoned urban soil. Where the attack dogs had raced up and down, old ladies now ventured for a walk. Where two world systems had faced each other across the sand, rival Turkish gangs showed up to play their evening football. Where searchlights had raked the void, lovers came to conceal themselves in the foliage.

In 1994, as part of a bid for the Olympic Games, the city had the No Man’s Land landscaped to a design by the Hamburg architect Gustav Lange. Berlin didn’t get the Olympics, but it did get a new park. The Mauerpark became a hangout for punks and teenagers, who drank and smoked and did deals on the hill. Occasionally they rioted. Mostly they did nothing. There is a wall in the Mauerpark that might or might not have been the Wall. This wall blazes with colorful graffiti, but it is not the art of protest and satire. It is a gallery of abstract hieroglyphs meaningful only to the impenetrable coteries of local delinquents who stake their ever-changing, arbitrary claims to a territory that belongs to no one.

No one except Vivico, that is, since it owns all the land that had
once belonged to the railways on both sides of the Wall. The company donated some of its parcels to the Berlin city council for the Mauerpark, with the landscaping funded by the city on the basis of environmental conservation. Now Vivico wants to build houses on the remainder of the land it owns, but the city won’t give it a building permit: the city says that the construction would harm the ecosystem of the park. The people, represented by Jacqueline Röber, are campaigning for the city to buy the land to protect and expand the park, but Vivico is asking for a market rate that the city can’t possibly afford. The city can’t buy. Vivico can’t build. The people make do with half a park, and the land is suspended, as it has always been, in limbo.

U
TE WENT TO
London, to make her fortune and see the world. She found work as a pastry chef in a smart restaurant, she worked hard, and she made good money. She could buy whatever she wanted, but she wasn’t happy. Ute had never been abroad before, and she didn’t speak English easily. She found people false and cold. “They always ask you over for a cup of tea, and say how nice it is to see you,” she’d complain, “but they don’t mean it.”

About five years ago, Ute went home. She moved back into the flat in East Berlin she’d left a decade before. The plumber came around and removed the old coal boiler in the living room and put in central heating instead. She bought a new kitchen, painted the bathroom, had a telephone installed, and got a television. The street outside was unrecognizable: all the buildings had been replastered and painted in bright colors. There was a shopping mall across the road, incomprehensible computerized ticket machines at the U-Bahn station, and endless, endless coffee shops.

At least her old friends were the same, she thought. But, actually, they weren’t; they were as emptily friendly as the people she’d met in England. Once upon a time, they had all lived in one another’s pockets, hand to mouth, closely connected to one another by their mutual fear of the state. Now they’d say, “Let’s go for a drink sometime,” and then she’d never hear from them. Berlin felt like nowhere in particular, inhabited by millions of people who were no one in particular. While she was away, it had turned into a no-man’s-land.

H
AGEN
K
OCH NOW
lives happily ever after as a tour guide in Berlin. He works in the old Secret Police headquarters, which is now a museum, and takes children and tourists on walks around the city looking for traces of the Wall. He has amassed the largest collection of Wall memorabilia in existence, including histories, photographs, and, of course, maps, marked again and again with the line he painted on the pavement that summer morning in 1961. It was the same Hagen Koch who, twenty-nine years later, coordinated the removal of the fragments of his Wall to Monaco, where they were sold off to the highest bidder and dispersed across the globe. Now he is the guide and the guardian of what’s left of his creation. There’s not much.