It has a collection of everything from East German blueprints to Soviet artwork.

The museum’s most spectacular exhibit is probably its portion of the Berlin Wall. It is the biggest chunk of the wall anywhere outside of Berlin.h

So where exactly is this museum where all this Cold War stuff is amassed?

Hint: It is nowhere near Eastern Europe. It is within the heart of “Screenland” not the heart of the old continent.

The Wende Museum is located in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles, Calif.

For many scholars and historians, the Wende is a treasure trove of unusual objects from East Germany and Eastern Europe, which you won’t find in many other archives.

The World’s Matthew Brunwasser recently visited the museum.

The Wende (“Turning point” in German) Museum offers the rich resources of its Los Angeles-based collection to visitors, scholars and exhibitions. Almost 6,000 miles away from the divisive historical debates in Berlin, the Wende hopes to preserve selected physical remains of the Cold War in order to inform present and future generations about its legacy.

An anonymous business park in sunny southern California is the unlikely home for this Cold War archive. It’s hard to imagine anywhere farther away from the emotional debates about Europe’s painful past, but Museum director Justinian Jampol says that’s exactly the point.

“We wanted to have a archive away from it all, to be able to begin to preserve the materials for future generations,” says Jampol.

Europeans have long been ready to move on, so saving the material culture of the unpleasant era isn’t especially high on anyone’s list. Jampol says the museum sends out scouts across Eastern Europe looking for art and artifacts, including Communist-era statues about to be melted down for scrap.

“That happened up until about a year ago,” Jampol says. “We have a 10 foot bronze sculpture, by Bondarenko, one of the very important Russian artists, that was still being melted down. And we got a call saying that this is available and we bought it for the price of the bronze plus five percent.”

Preserving the history of political, cultural and personal life, the Wende collects materials you won’t find in a typical historical archive.

“Ranging from furniture to blueprints to design material, artwork, menus, erotika, photo albums, journals, diaries,” Jampol says.

The collection also includes pop music, like the Puhdys, one of East Germany’s most popular rock bands.

“This is dissident artwork, this is from perestroika in the 80s, critical of both Lenin and Stalin, when the process started of coming to terms with the past,” says Jampol. “In fact, this is one of my favorite pieces…”

One of the iconic pieces is a bust of Lenin which once stood in Leipzig, the Tahrir Square of East Europe back in the tumultuous days of October 1989.

“It was painted to look like a clown using pink and green florescent paints,” Jampol says. “As the main figure of the ideology, if you could paint him like a clown, what next? Where does the state stand? In fact, one month later to the day, the Berlin wall collapsed.”

The main archive has about 75,000 items in its supermarket-sized facility. Many might find this enormous and neatly organized and cataloged collection of historical bric-a-brac – a warehouse full of old junk.

Scholars find it a precious resource of valuable information about the minutia of daily Cold War life. But outside academia, the Wende has another life, trying to make the Cold War resonate with the public today.

It is a living museum after all. The Wende organizes public events like one celebrating the anniversary of the Berlin wall coming down. The Wende built a replica across Wilshire Boulevard — dividing LA for a night into west and east.

One current exhibition displays original surveillance equipment of the Stasi, or East German secret police. The idea is to provoke debate about contemporary surveillance of American citizens.

While Europeans try to put the Cold War behind them, the Wende is trying its best to give life to the memory and the lessons learned.

At the height of the Cold War, in 1987, Ronald Reagan famously urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

He was referring to the Berlin Wall, right next to the Brandenburg gate.

Two years later the Berlin wall came down. But in the German capital today, there are few signs of Reagan’s historic statement or the man himself for that matter.

Berlin has streets named after prominent Americans like Benjamin Franklin, John Foster Dulles, and Frank Zappa.

John F. Kennedy has a plaza, an institute, a school to his name, not to mention a private museum at the Brandenburg Gate. But there is no reference to Ronald Reagan there.

Some Berliners think there should be some commemoration of America’s 40th president, but Berlin Senate spokesman Günter Kolodziej said there is simply no room.

Günter Kolodziej (Photo: Susan Stone)

Kolodziej pointed out that Ronald Reagan was made an honorary citizen in 1992, along with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev — the highest honor the city can bestow.

“Of course, Berlin reveres Mr. Reagan,” Kolodziej said. “I believe that Berlin has recognized him, and that his spirit remains present in the city.”

Left-wing Senate

It is not just a question of space. There is a policy now in Berlin to name streets after women to make up for the gender imbalance.

Martin Lindner (photo: Susan Stone)

“The real background is that there is a pretty left-wing Senate,” said Lindner, a member of the free market, pro-business FDP.

He has been campaigning in vain for several years to have a street named after the Republican president. Lindner blamed political in-fighting and lukewarm feelings about Reagan in the former east for holding things up.

“I have learned in politics naming streets is one of the most emotional things you can do,” Lindner said.

After Reagan died in 2004, Lindner proposed changing the name of the area near the city’s new train station, which was named after George Washington in 1932. “When people come by train to Berlin, they would arrive at the Ronald Reagan Place. Good idea!” Lindner said.

Tear down this wall

But the idea never took hold. Instead, one of the only places you find the “tear down this wall” line, along with a small photo taken during the 1987 speech, is in one of Berlin’s newest subway stations.

On a recent day, those passing through the station had mixed feelings about naming something in the city after Reagan. A few people supported it. But Gabriele Feltzger, who was born in 1945, said street names don’t tell the whole story.

“With 20 years of hindsight, when we see how everything turned out, maybe those in charge weren’t as clever as we always thought they were,” Feltzger said.

Her friend, Stephanie Prose was more concerned that a ceremonial street naming would be an empty gesture. “When we name places after well-known political figures who have done something for Berlin, we need to explain it on a sign or a plaque, explain why we should care.”

On Sunday, February 6th, there will be celebrations at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, CA, for the 100th anniversary of Reagan’s birth.

In the library, a piece of the Berlin Wall, decorated with a graffiti butterfly, holds a place of honor.

In Berlin, however, no movement on the issue of commemorating Ronald Reagan is expected until after the next local election, in September.

On a day when we’re remembering soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember. That can depend on the nature of historical events, whether we identify with victors or victims, with brave acts or evil ones. In Germany, memory of the past is often painful: two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall. Now, Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events. Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways. Download MP3 (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

• Neues Museum
• Berlin-based Yiddishkeit band ‘Jewdyssee’
• Berlin Wall graffiti

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MARCO WERMAN:  On a day when we remember soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember.  That can depend on the nature of historical events and whether we view them with pride or with shame.  In Germany, memory of the past is often painful.  Two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, now Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events.  Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways.

ALISSA QUART:  Berlin is a city of odd collisions.  Collisions of architecture, 19th century buildings next to severe modern ones.  Angry graffiti on fancy stores in the former East Berlin.  People collide here too.  I was part of that briefly.  An American Jew sorting through the city, adding the fragments of my own family’s history in Europe into the mix.  Berlin’s buildings offered some clues.  This is the Neues Museum.  Neues means new in German and this museum is new, well pieces of it are.  As I walk up the museum’s giant steps, I can see strips of exploded old bricks incorporated into sturdy new ones.  The museum has been rebuilt using the ruins of the original 19th century museum building.  It was bombed during World War II and then left to decay by the East German government.  It reopened late last year.  The new structure, renovated by British architect David Chipperfield uses bits and pieces of the 1850 one.  There’s weird 19th century iron work, World War II bullet holes, walls and ceilings left chipped and stained.  I had to fight through the crowds to get through.  Olivia Zorn who works at the museum leads me around.  She points out the layers from different periods.

OLIVIA ZORN:  The idea of the conservation of this building was to show all what is preserved.  The top painting, the paintings on the pillars.  After that it was damaged in the Second World War.  And we will show all these details.

QUART: We pass the bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.  It’s the best known exhibit here.  It too is surrounded by fragments of history.  Sitting under a half-conserved kitschy 19th century mural of the Roman God Hercules.  Nefertiti is very beautiful.  The Egyptians want her back now.  I am told I can’t ask about that.  The sound of a large curved horn from the Bronze Age plays next to where the horn itself is displayed.  Nearby ancient bracelets and rings are shown in dirt and sand.  Some critics and curators find the renovation of the Neues Museum annoyingly artsy.  The bullet holes and broken brick, a cliché of World War II trauma, all in clever quotations.  A more direct approach can be seen at the museum at the Wannsee Conference House.  It was at this house in 1942 that Nazi leaders planned the Final Solution, the extermination of Europe’s Jews.  Among them, many in my own family.  The museum is stark and the house unchanged.  Tapes featuring the voice of Adolf Eichmann play in a corner of one room.  I had forgotten that cigarettes and cognac were served during the planning of the Final Solution.  The Neues Museum, of course, is aiming for a more self-conscious vision of German history.  Art historian Benjamin Buchloh thinks the result is remarkable, incorporating fragments like corny 19th century wall paintings.  Those reminders of the past hint at how the history of Germany’s heroic fantasies about itself long preceded Fascism.

BENJAMIN BUCHLOH:  They really give us a sense of the intensity with which Germans in the 19th century desired to remake themselves in the image of the Greco-Roman culture.  That type of imagery that is still left in the museum reminds you of that.  So as you go through the museum, as you look at the collection, you start thinking about the history that necessitated and formed the collections and the museum architecture itself.

QUART: Buchloh is also impressed that the Neues rebels against a typical new museum building.  Many new museums aim to invoke jaw-dropping awe, sometimes at the expense of the art they’re showing.  And the Neues engages you more than those buildings do, says Susan Howe, an American poet who has been writing about the Neues.  That’s because the museum doesn’t try to be a shiny new place that has all the answers.  This museum is purposefully incomplete.

SUSAN HOWE:  This building represents a feeling of no final intentions, or a museum that is open, open to the sky literally.

QUART: I, too, have long believed places and histories are more fractured than they appear.  I think that’s what the museum is saying as well.  In Berlin and in so many other cities, the best thing any new structure can do is disown the past and honor it as well.  The Neues Museum does this by retelling the past in fragments, while still cherishing Nefertiti.  For The World, I’m Alissa Quart, Berlin.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• See photos from Ostel
• The World’s Coverage: First breach in the Iron Curtain

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• Laura Lynch’s story on the first breach of the Iron Curtain in 1989
• Susan Stone reports how young Germans remember East Germany
• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LAURA LYNCH:  Students at this downtown school attend classes in a building that sits in the middle of Hungary’s storied history, is just blocks from the banks of the Danube where you can see the majestic Buda castle and the houses of parliament.  But being surrounded by history doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing history, especially recent history.

SPEAKER:  What are you going to be doing on November ninth?  Do you know what November ninth is?  Anybody?

LYNCH:  The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall isn’t a notable date for this class of seventeen and eighteen year olds.  Their parents may talk about the events of twenty years ago, but Norbert Nag and Fahnee Kerestesh are pretty much unmoved.

NORBERT NAG:  What it means to my mother is not the same what it means to me so of course she felt it much more personally as I did because I wasn’t even born at that time.

FAHNEE KERESTESH:  I see it like any kind of other Hungarian historical event because it was important but not personally.  Emotionally, it’s nothing.

LYNCH:  Daniel Szabo says his parents describe it as a time when life was simpler and safer.

DANIEL SZABO:  They said that there were more security on the streets and the police guys were on the streets not for get money from the bad guys but for make security on the streets.

LYNCH:  The students do study Hungary’s history but the events of 1989 aren’t covered in the official curriculum.  That’s frustrated for teacher Yanas Varga.  He thinks students really don’t understand or appreciate the monumental change that took place.

YANAS VARGA:  Sometimes I have time to tell them my stories.  For example, when I was a student in the 1970’s, reading an English newspaper or reading a weekly such as the Newsweek was a serious offense.  I was summoned by the deputy headmaster and I was threatened to be thrown out of school.  I was really frightened.  They laugh at it.

LYNCH:  That apparent complacency is one of the reasons Hungary opened the so-called House of Terror a few years ago inside the former headquarters of both the Nazi and Communist era secret police.  School groups are led through exhibits detailing the horrors of life back then.  The trains that shipped thousands off to the Gulags, the harsh living conditions and toward the end, the killings.  As an elevator descends to the basement prison cells, a video screen shows a former guard dispassionately describing the execution process.  Curator Maria Schmidt complains Hungary’s transition to democracy was so quick, so relatively smooth, Communist leaders were never really forced to account for what happened.  The story was never told from the victims’ point of view.

MARIA SCHMIDT:  I wanted to win the battle against the monopoly of the left wing, narrative on Hungarian history of the mainly, particularly on the twentieth century. I think that’s the most important part of democracy that you cannot monopolize the way of people are thinking on history.

LYNCH:  But twenty years ago it seemed there was no time for reflection.  Instead, it was a headlong rush into the future and the future was capitalism.  Few sense that better than George Hemingway.  Today the American-Hungarian businessman is investing in the next generation himself, buying a soccer team and building a training ground in the suburbs of Budapest.  Hemingway has been in the game of investing here from the moment Communism ended, flying in from his home in Las Vegas to do business.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY:  When we came here in 1989, everybody thought I was making a foolish decision.  And we made a ton of money.

LAURA LYNCH:  Hemingway bought dozens of restaurants, food stores, a computer company and more.  He introduced Hungarians to Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Dunkin Donuts.  But a few years ago, the economy started to stumble.  Government debt soared.  Hemingway saw it happen and got rid of half of his portfolio.

GEORGE HEMINGWAY:  The government was spending, spending and spending without any idea where the country, where it was taking the country.  Even what they were spending, they were spending badly and Hungary became a basket case.

LYNCH:  The global financial crisis made matters worse.  Last year, Hungary had to turn to the World Bank, IMF and EU for a twenty five billion dollar bailout.  There are new austerity measures in place.  Hemingway thinks Hungarians still haven’t come to terms with the sometimes harsh realities of the free marketplace.

HEMINGWAY:  Yes they won freedom and yes they want to make money and yes they want capitalism as much as they understand it, but they also want free healthcare, they want free schools, they want free universities, they want to go to the mayor and get some money if they don’t have it.

LYNCH:  It’s a combustible mix for a country still rising from the ashes of its Communist past.  The disappointment has led to deep political divisions and as in other former Eastern Bloc nations, a rise in popularity for extreme right wing groups.  Historian Attila Pok finds the shift disturbing.

ATTILA POK:  For the great euphoria of ten years ago totally vanished and people who have no option, find these black and white answers appealing.

LYNCH:  High school student Norbert Nag says he knows people who miss the stability that came with Communism and he kind of understands it.

NORBERT NAG:  You don’t want to know my opinion.

LYNCH:  I do, go ahead and share.

NAG:  No, it’s just a childish opinion, you know.  Dictatorship maybe because no, that’s not going to work, really.  It’s just a joke, a childish joke.

LYNCH:  This generation may not know that much about what happened two decades ago, but there’s no doubt these young men and women carry the weight of the past.  The expectations of 1989 have come to land at the feet of those who will have to move forward into the country’s uncertain future.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in Budapest.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  If you live in Berlin and like stadium rock, well today could be your lucky day.  That’s Irish supergroup, U2.  The band is performing a free concert in Berlin tonight to mark twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The anniversary is Monday.  Ten thousand Berliners and tourists snapped up free tickets for the concert, organized by MTV.  U2 will play in front of the Brandenburg Gate.  It’s a famous landmark visible from different parts of the city, only it won’t be so visible tonight.  The concert organizers are blocking off the view for those without tickets and their method is time tested.  They put up a temporary twelve foot high wall.  I know, weird.  I wish I were kidding.  There will be plenty of other parties in Berlin this weekend, presumably with greater access than that one at the Brandenburg Gate.  But for many living in what was once the Eastern Bloc, this anniversary isn’t much cause for celebration.  The last twenty years brought some welcomed freedoms, but they’ve also brought hardship and uncertainty, especially for young people growing up after Communism.  The World’s Laura Lynch begins our story in a high school in the Hungarian capital, Budapest.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Retired border guard Arpad Bella remembers when the fences at the border were electrified. (Photo: Laura Lynch)

• Hungary’s role in the 1989 revolutions
• 1989: Europe’s revolution
• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago signaling the end of the Cold War. That of course happened in Germany but some, including a former German leader, say it was communist Hungary that kicked the first stone out of the wall. It all involved some critical decisions by a handful of Hungarians and a fateful picnic. The World’s Laura Lynch has the story from Western Hungary.

[TRAFFIC]

LAURA LYNCH: Cars cross freely into Austria on this narrow road just outside the border town of Sopron. There are no guards, no one checking passports. Under European Union rules everyone can pass freely. Retired border guard Arpad Bella remembers when it wasn’t like that at all. The fence was electrified, land mines were underfoot and he was ready to shoot.

ARPAD BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: It was an order up until 1989 to fire if someone tried to cross the border illegally. If someone wanted to cross and he didn’t stop when he was ordered to do so, when that person tried to flee we had to use our guns.

LYNCH: But things were starting to shift at the beginning of 1989. The then prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, decided to order guards to switch off the electricity and dismantle the barbed wire billing it as a cost-saving measure. Advisors warned him against it. They feared there would be a repeat of the violence of 1956 when the Soviets cracked down on an uprising in Hungary. So in March of 1989 Nemeth went to Moscow to tell Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev about his plans.

MIKLOS NEMETH: I was not asking for permission from him but I briefed him. I told him that we made already the decision to pull down the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria mainly for financial reasons. For us, or for me, it was the most important thing – to check how strong Gorbachev position was that time. So then I told him we destroying, physically destroying, the barbed wired. First test. No negative reaction.

LYNCH: The fence at Sopron was dismantled. Nemeth made certain everyone knew about it. Laszlo Magas, a professor in a nearby town, got the message loud and clear. Magas had his own personal reasons for wanting to see the Iron Curtain fall.

LASZLO MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: In the 50s for political reasons my mother was in prison for one and a half year precisely because she tried to escape to the west and she was caught.

LYNCH: Magas says what happened to his mother inspired him to organize what he and other activists called pan-European picnic at the end of August in 1989. They wanted to hold the picnic at the border, open it up for a few hours as a symbolic gesture, then go home. What neither Magas nor guard Bella Arpad knew was that bus loads of East German’s were on their way to their border intent on escaping to the west. They were in effect refugees who had come to Hungary on holiday and stayed until they saw posters written in German advertising the picnic. Hungary’s government was responsible for the posters – part of a plan to encourage the refugees to the border that day. Arpad and his fellow guards weren’t told about the plan or what to do when the East German’s approached.

BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: It was impossible for the five of us to stop 600 East German’s who were coming toward us. The only way to stop them would have been to use our weapons. The government simply dumped the responsibility onto our shoulders.

LYNCH: Arpad had only seconds to make a decision.

BELLA: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: If we had tried to stop them it would have made things worse. If we had fired warning shots there would have been so much panic. There would have been violence. We would have had to use force. But if we let them go without doing anything then I would be responsible for it because I didn’t obey the orders.

LYNCH: Arpad told his fellow guards to stand aside. All day long the East Germans kept coming. Six hundred and seventy one of them in total. Laszlo Magas watched in amazement and also with a little bit of fear.

MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

TRANSLATOR: Obviously we all thought this might have consequences and in the evening we did get threats. But the next morning people said we made history. And something really important had occurred.

LYNCH: Over the next few weeks more and more East German’s poured over the border. Within three months the Berlin Wall had fallen and Prime Minister Nemeth was presiding over a new Hungary.

NEMETH: I did not do the impossible. But I have done all it was possible that time. And that’s why I am so proud of the very fact that when I stepped down in May 1990 and I went back to see in my native village my father, he clapped my shoulders and said to me son well done.

LYNCH: Two decades later the country is struggling. The economy is in tatters. There are deep political divisions and a recent poll suggests many Hungarians say they’ve lost more than they gained since 1989. Standing at the site of that momentous picnic Laszlo Magas acknowledges the problems but he believes it’s all been worth it.

MAGAS: [SPEAKING HUNGARIAN]

LYNCH: He says, I think yes the fact we got freedom that my family is living in peace. As for the conflicts we’re facing now they’re part of human nature. I’m not going to get into that now.

For The World I’m Laura Lynch, near Sopron, Hungary.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

• BBC Mundo (en español)

• The World’s Gerry Hadden revisits the former East German border
• The World’s Alex Gallafent on owning a piece of the Berlin Wall
• Former leaders recall Berlin Wall’s fall

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a speech today to a joint session of the US Congress. Merkel grew up in what was communist East Germany. Today she thanked US law makers for America’s support in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That happened 20 years ago next week. Now there’s a whole generation of German’s born after the wall came down and as Susan Stone reports from Berlin many young Germans know little about their country’s recent painful past.

SUSAN STONE: As the autumn sun sets a group of 15 and 16 year olds from the central western city of Selm have just about had their fill of history. Still they crowd around Hans-Michael Schulze, a guide at Berlin’s DDR Museum. The boys perk up when we get to the Trabant exhibit. Schulze tells them how long East Germans waited to get these cheap plastic polluting cars and why they were nearly the only autos available.

HANS-MICHAEL SCHULZE: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: Giving a tour like this now, 20 years after the end of East Germany, well it’s really astounding how little is known.

STONE: The kids have the basics. They know there was a Berlin Wall and the Stasi, the secret police, but not much more. History teacher Nicole Abendroth is accompanying her class. East Germany is on the lesson plan for later in the year. She says the tenth graders don’t have much of connection to the former East.

NICOLE ABENDROTH: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: I think in the end the DDR amounts to a feeling. What people experienced here essentially confined to their country and that is truly how to convey I have to admit. That’s why I think it’s important to come here. That the students really get a chance to get to know what it was like.

STONE: Across town at the Stasi Museum 18-year-old Kathrin Weiss and her classmates gasp and laugh as a guide describes the miles of files the Stasi kept on ordinary citizens. Weiss says she’s heard a bit about East Germany from her godmother who grew up there. It wasn’t so bad, her godmother told her. As long as you didn’t criticize the system you could have a normal family life just like in the West. But Kathrin is starting to question that.

KATHRIN WEISS: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: It’s not right what she said but she probably just didn’t know. She never realized. She never noticed. And maybe, my God, when you’re not seriously confronted with it you don’t really deal with it. She grew up that way so she didn’t know anything else.

STONE: Kathrin is from Bavaria what was once part of West Germany. Students like her often know more about the former East than young people living in the region today. That’s according to the Stasi Museum’s Uwe Hillmer. He and colleagues at Berlin’s Free University spent three years interviewing students about this period. But Hillmer says it’s not just students who are uninformed.

UWE HILLMER: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: The division of Germany in the post-war period is probably one of the most documented in history. But the reality is that the collective historical memory is at zero. And all these countless 20^th anniversary events aren’t changing everything. We’re stuck at zero.

STONE: Not far from the Stasi Museum sit two teenagers, Robin and Robert, whose parents grew up in East Germany. Have they visited the Stasi Museum, the DDR Museum, or the Berlin Wall Memorial?

ROBIN AND ROBERT: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

STONE: The answer each time is no. And that’s not uncommon for young people in Berlin. Robert says he’d like to visit a museum with his father to give them a better venue for discussing this history than the car or the breakfast table. Robin hasn’t talked much about East Germany with his parents but he does remember this comment.

ROBIN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: My mother told me for example, it was a very socially-minded time. That there was work for everyone. Not like today where we have so many unemployed people just sitting around. Actually it wasn’t such a bad time. I think it was good.

STONE: These are troubling statements for some Germans who view it as a dangerous nostalgia. But they’re also legitimate memories that contribute to a national fabric of understanding says Leopold Gruen. Gruen is a Berlin-based film maker who grew up in East Germany, later married a West German woman, and had two kids. The fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification paved the way for his family.

LEOPOLD GRUEN: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

TRANSLATOR: For me the most important thing in relaying history is that you have to search for traces in your own biography, in your family. Then ultimately you have the chance to share the experience of history. Private histories are the tiles of the mosaic. They’re like the pieces of a puzzle that can somehow be put together.

STONE: As successive generations grow up and pass on complex histories to their own children, it’s important again in Germany not to forget the past. The hope is that in this anniversary year marking the fall of the Berlin Wall somehow the shadows of the past will illuminate Germany’s future. For The World I’m Susan Stone in Berlin.

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Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Berlin, only a tiny stretch of the wall remains as a memorial. From 1961 to 1989, 89 people were killed trying to escape over it. Such attempts are well documented. But a less talked about Cold War border was even deadlier. We’re referring to the northernmost section of the border separating East Germany from West Germany. Twenty four years ago, our Europe Correspondent Gerry Hadden lived along that dividing line, in the tiny beach town of Travemunde, West Germany. He recently went back to see how things have changed, and to learn more about those who tried to escape there. Download MP3

Gerry also produced this slideshow:

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH, Boston.  You could say the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989.  Organizers of next week’s 20th anniversary festivities hope to recapture the euphoria of the moment.  But there are also sober memories of the split between East and West Germany.  Eighty-nine people were killed trying to cross the wall.  Even more died trying to flee East Germany at the northernmost section of the border.  That’s where The World’s Gerry Hadden used to live, in the beach town of Travemunde.  He recently returned and sent us this report.

GERRY HADDEN: Travemunde literally means Mouth of the Trave River.  The Trave empties here into the Baltic Sea, and it once divided West from East.  I lived here, on the west side, as an exchange student in 1986.  The town is much the same today:  tidy, wealthy, built mostly around sailing and tourism.  During the summer months it really comes alive.  But during the Cold War, the warm months brought constant reminders of a divided country in the form of people trying to   escape over the sea.   I lived here in winter, so I never saw an escape attempt, but locals, like 45 year old Torsten Eichhof, did.  Fishing along the Trave’s bank recently, he recalls a night twenty years ago when he was bartending in a nearby beach hotel.

TORSTEN EICHHOF:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  He says, “I was working a night shift in the pub when suddenly the door swung open.  Standing outside were these four soaking wet people, a couple and two kids.  They said, ‘Can someone call the authorities?  We’ve just escaped from East Germany.’  They’d made it in a little dinghy.  We wrapped them up in warm blankets, then cooked them some big steaks.  Only after they’d had a good first meal did we call the police.”  According to researchers nearly 6,000 people

tried to cross this stretch of Baltic during the Cold War.  Nearly a thousand made it; 174 people died.  The rest were caught.  I remember what made the crossing here so dangerous.  Less than a mile from Travemunde’s beaches, East German military gunboats patrolled day and night.  On land a triple fence, covered in barbed wire and surrounded by mines, reached right to the water’s edge.  You never saw anyone just out walking on the East side.   It made you wonder what life was like over there.  Today a ferry plods across the mouth of the Trave.  It leaves us about a mile from the old East/ West checkpoint.  But just before going through that checkpoint, I stop in at the   house of Cristina Volkt-Mueller and her husband Bodo.   The Muellers are from the former East.   In the early 1980s they tried  to escape in a sailboat, but they were caught before clearing port.

CRISTINA MUELLER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  Cristina says, “It’s still hard to describe the feelings. You think, my god, what is going to happen now? There’s nothing you can do.  You’re trapped.  It’s a terrible feeling of powerlessness and fear.  We’d spent a lot of time working this escape out, anticipating freedom.  When that gets quashed you are just devastated.”  The Muellers, like tens of thousands of others, ended up in a Stasi jail.  After their release, they spent years under state surveillance.  Today Cristina and Bodo research Baltic escape attempts.  Bodo tells me of one man who invented a hand-held underwater jet that pulled him to freedom.  Another guy painted his sailboat sails black and tried at night.  He got nabbed.  A third man, a doctor, swam 30 miles to the West, fueled by methamphetamines.  But Bodo says most people tried to flee simply on whatever was at hand, on whatever floated.

BODO MUELLER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   Bodo says many people tried to paddle across on air mattresses because having a

boat was complicated, because you had to smuggle a boat to the beach in pieces and assemble it there.  But if you were staying in a legal campsite you could have an air mattress.   So many people tried to escape spontaneously.  But the sea is cold and often there are heavy waves.  Lots of people drowned.  On this day I make the crossing in the other direction on land in a car.  It’s the first time I visited this once off limits area.  In the nearby village of Poetenitz I meet Sabina Kieler.  While I was studying in Travemunde, Kieler was working on a farm I could literally see, right across the border.  She says only a select few were allowed so close to the enemy.

SABINA KIELER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “You had to finish your work by 8 PM.  If you were still in the fields after that or you didn’t have your passport they’d lock you up for three days.  It was very confined work.  You couldn’t go left or right.  There were no toilets so we would go into the bushes, but you had to be careful.  If you took one step too far the guards would descend on you.”  Kieler says one day in early November, 1989, someone came running across the fields yelling that the border had opened.  At first no one believed him, then the joy set in.  As the news spread, Kieler and other East Germans poured into Travemunde by the tens of thousands.   And West Germans came out to greet them with champagne and gifts.   But 20 years later Kieler says reunification has been a mixed bag.

KIELER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “Some things are better.  You can travel anywhere and buy whatever you want. But some things are worse, for example, childcare. Back in the old days there was guaranteed space for all kids in daycare.  Today hardly anyone gets in because there just too few spots.”  The other thing is the economy, she says, Lots of the old manufacturing here was destroyed with reunification.  And the West, she says, didn’t invest much in revitalizing the local economy.  But overall Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to help the East get backs on its feet.  And as time passes it’s clear that the differences between the two Germanys have lessened.  That’s good news for everyone, but for Ingrid Schatz it also presents a danger.    Schatz runs the Lubeck Border Museum.   It’s housed in a former East German passport inspection house just across the old line from Travemunde.

INGRID SCHATZ:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   On a recent morning, Schatz is showing the black and white photos of the massive border installations that once dominated the countryside.  She says, “Everything you see in the photo is gone.  The big border station, the fences, everything.  The only thing remaining is this one house.  That’s why we started this border museum.”  She says a German border like this, as deadly as it once was, should not just be forgotten. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Travemunde, Germany.

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• BBC Archive: The Berlin Wall
• BBC Audio Documentary: How the Wall Fell

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. IN Berlin today, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was sworn in fro a second term. Merkel famously grew up in communist East Germany. And 20 years ago in the weeks before the wall came down she was helping organize protests against the government there. The wall of course was the most potent symbol of the cold war dividing the city of Berlin in two. Many who attempted to cross form east to west were killed at its base. The collapse of the wall signaled the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Here’s Dan Rather on CBC.

DAN RATHER: In Berlin this is the definitely the “in” place to be. The sites and sounds – all the joy and the history in front of the Brandenburg Gate with West Berliners partying literally on top of the Berlin Wall in front of the gate.

CLARK: But when the wall came down it didn’t disappear. It just went other places as The World’s Alex Gallafent reports.

ALEX GALLAFENT: When I started working on this story I put something up on Facebook which just said, “Do you own a piece of the Berlin Wall?” The answers came flooding in from the United States, Britain, and beyond.

MONTAGE OF VARIOUS VOICES: My husband has a piece in his office. There was some at a lunch I went to last week. I think my brother’s got a piece. My sister owns a tiny, tiny chunk.

GALLAFENT: The Berlin Wall is kind of everywhere now – especially in the West. It wasn’t just bulldozers and wrecking balls that took the wall down. It was hammers and chisels – individuals claiming fragments of history, wrapping them up to keep or sending them home to family or friends – to people like Noah Isenberg. He owns a chunk too.

NOAH ISENBERG: It was just in this little yellow cardboard container that I used to always have on my bookshelves and yet for some strange reason it’s gone missing.

HOWARD ROSENBERG: Well it’s interesting. I sort of feel like I have a piece of the wall too but it’s a different kind of a piece. It’s the piece that’s in my memory.

GALLAFENT: When the wall came down Howard Rosenberg was the TV critic for Los Angeles Times. He remembers how each of the major networks sent an anchor to be live at the wall. As Rosenberg puts it, “to validate the story for Americans back home.”

ROSENBERG: I mean television does this all the time. I always think of these stories as like a whale being carved up by Eskimos in which they use every bit of the whale – every part of it goes for something and everybody takes a little chunk out of it as if they were … . In this case individually taking a chunk out of the wall. A couple of them even climbed the wall on a ladder. You can’t say that they eclipsed this momentous event but they certainly chipped into it.

GALLAFENT: Even as it came down the wall and its meaning were being claimed. It meant the end of oppression or the triumph of freedom or capitalism. Today in Los Vegas it means something … . Well I’m not quite sure what it means. At the Main Street Station Casino Brewery and Hotel there’s a hefty section of the wall positioned behind the men’s urinals.

ROSENBERG: [LAUGHING] Oh I love it. That’s just great.

GALLAFENT: Since 1989 the wall has been sold, bought, and donated. It’s been broken apart and reconstructed. There were the small fragments. Some real. Some fake. And then there are the larger pieces. Entire sections of the wall transplanted to new homes. A few of that type are here in New York including one in the heart of the Midtown Business District. A section of the wall has been placed in a courtyard next to an office building.

JULIANE CAMFIELD: It’s still very intense. It seems so out of place.

GALLAFENT: I met someone who knew the wall when it was still The Wall.

CAMFIELD: It almost seems unreal. It seems like … . It looks like a movie prop. It seems to me like it can’t be really here.

GALLAFENT: Juliane Camfield was born in West Berlin in 1968, seven years after the wall went up. She left in 1989, the year it came down. Now she’s a New Yorker. Camfield is her married name. She studies this section of the wall from a distance. It’s painted with colorful graffiti faces, as much of the western side was. And set behind the wall there’s a fountain, a curtain of water framing the whole thing.

CAMFIELD: I think that’s part of what makes it so unreal for me. To have this weird fountain thing in the background because the fountain is sort of something soothing and you know a little tacky. And I think the wall it’s not beautiful, it’s something very provocative and shocking and symbolizing terror and death and separation and I don’t want it to be smoothed out.

GALLAFENT: Juliane Camfield more than anyone else I spoke to, seemed like she really owned a piece of the Berlin Wall. She had relatives in the East. The wall prevented her from knowing them. Her only link was what she learned from her two grandmothers on walks around West Berlin, a little island of freedom.

CAMFIELD: And we’d eventually end up at the wall because wherever you went at some point you would end up at the wall and they really, I guess, they kept their memories alive. They kept their connections to their nephews, nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts. It was very close to their heart. So when I heard them speak about it I guess these two grandmothers more than anything for me established the outrageousness of that piece of architecture.

GALLAFENT: Not everyone has a story like Juliane’s. Even people in Berlin itself are no longer defined by the wall as they once were.

CAMFIELD: When I think about Berlin it is mostly a divided Berlin because I grew up in a divided Berlin. When I go back and visit I realize it’s a very different city now and the people I knew when I grew up and who did not leave Berlin, for them I think it is much less present even thought hey live there, than it is present for me even though I live away from Berlin. It’s a paradox.

GALLAFENT: But Camfield’s certain of one thing. She will never own an actual piece of the Berlin Wall. In fact she says she doesn’t even think of it as an object. Thinking about its meaning is enough.

CAMFIELD: Do I need to look at it to be aware of that? No, I know that. I don’t need to have it.

GALLAFENT: And so she walks away carrying only the idea of the long gone Berlin Wall. For The World I’m Alex Gallafent in New York.

CLARK: You can see photos of Juliane Camfield and the Berlin Wall at The World dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.