Berlin Wall Memorial

Where it sits. The Berlin Wall Memorial runs for about 1.4 kilometres along Bernauer Straße in the north of central Berlin, from Gartenstraße beside Nordbahnhof station in the west to Schwedter Straße and the Mauerpark in the east. It follows the exact line of the border between the districts of Mitte, which was in the Soviet sector, and Wedding, which was in the French sector — a line that ran not down the middle of the street but along the southern kerb, so that the buildings belonged to the East and the pavement in front of them to the West. That accident of municipal geography made Bernauer Straße the single most photographed, most escaped-from and most lethal stretch of the entire border, and it is why the federal and city governments chose this street rather than Checkpoint Charlie or the Brandenburg Gate for Germany's central memorial to the division.

The story behind it. Construction began at midnight on 13 August 1961. Within days the ground-floor windows of the Bernauer Straße houses were bricked up; residents jumped from upper floors onto West Berlin fire brigade nets, and the buildings were evacuated, sealed and finally demolished between 1963 and 1965. What replaced them, over the next quarter century, was a border installation of extraordinary depth: an inner wall, a signal fence, a patrol road, a raked sand strip, lamp masts, dog runs, watchtowers, and finally the 3.6-metre outer wall of L-shaped concrete segments capped with a smooth pipe. After 1989 almost all of it went — the Wall was demolished at a speed that later horrified historians. The memorial was created because a stretch here had survived, and its first section, a steel-flanked monument by the Stuttgart architects Kohlhoff & Kohlhoff, was dedicated in 1998. The documentation centre followed in 1999, the Chapel of Reconciliation in 2000, and a major expansion between 2010 and 2014 turned the whole strip into a continuous open-air exhibition.

What you actually see today. The centrepiece is at the Ackerstraße corner: a preserved 70-metre section where the full depth of the border strip stands as it was, complete with the outer wall, the inner wall, the patrol road and an original watchtower — the only place in Berlin where the installation can be understood in three dimensions rather than as a single line of concrete. Where the Wall itself is gone, its course is marked by rusted steel rods set upright in the ground, transparent enough to walk through and unmistakable at a distance. Cut-away sections of foundations, cellars and tunnel mouths are exposed under glass. The Window of Remembrance, a wall of photographs, carries portraits of the people who died at the Berlin border between 1961 and 1989. The Chapel of Reconciliation, an oval of rammed earth built in 2000 by Rudolf Reitermann and Peter Sassenroth, stands on the footprint of the neo-Gothic Church of Reconciliation of 1894, which was stranded in the death strip and blown up by the East German authorities on 22 January 1985; the new chapel's earth walls were mixed with rubble from the old church.

On screen. The Wall on this street is one of the most filmed objects of the twentieth century, and most of the footage was shot from the western pavement, because from there a camera could look straight into the East. Peter Leibing's photograph of the nineteen-year-old border guard Conrad Schumann leaping the coiled barbed wire at the corner of Ruppiner Straße on 15 August 1961 was taken here, along with the newsreel film of the same jump; both became the defining image of the Wall's first week. Documentary crews returned so often that Bernauer Straße supplied the visual grammar every subsequent fiction film would borrow. Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies (2015) reconstructed the Wall's first days for its Berlin sequences, and The Tunnel — the NBC documentary financed and filmed under this street in 1962 — is examined in the documentation centre's exhibition. The observation tower on the centre's roof gives the view that television crews used for thirty years, straight down the length of the preserved strip.

Getting there and timing. The S-Bahn station Nordbahnhof sits at the western end and has a permanent exhibition of its own on the Geisterbahnhöfe, the ghost stations that western trains rolled through without stopping while armed guards watched from the platforms. U-Bahn line U8 stops at Bernauer Straße in the middle of the site, and the M10 tram runs the length of it. Everything outdoors is free, open at all hours and level enough for wheelchairs; the documentation centre and the tower close on Mondays. Allow two hours, and walk the strip from west to east so the exhibition unfolds chronologically. Winter, with the light low and the ground bare, suits the subject better than a bright summer afternoon.