Martin John Callanan, Grounds (Berliner Mauer) 2009

Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu Grounds (Berliner Mauer), Martin John Callanan itakephotos.eu

The first guise of Berlin’s Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart was erected in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic to stem the exodus of its citizens to the West, for between 1948 and August 1962 nearly three million East Germans had escaped from the harsh policies to the West though the Berlin loophole.

“Only in Berlin did a fortified border run right though a city that was ethnically and culturally homogenous, separating families and friends and guarding not against potential intruders but incarcerating one’s own people.” [Leo Schmidt, 2005]

On two short trips to Berlin in 2008, I visited the couple of remnants that are generally known; the rest seemed to have completely disappeared from the streets of Berlin (with a few sections accessioned to museums around the world). The public memory of an endless border with watchtowers at regular intervals and floodlights continuously illuminating the border at night was no longer present.

In the summer of 2009, having been invited by Simon Faithfull to spend time researching in Mobile Research Unit no.1 at the Berlin Skulpturenpark - itself occupying vacant plots left by the removal of the Wall - I became fascinated with the remnants I had previously overlooked. From a mainly still intact tarmac patrol path and lampposts of the former death-strip still providing illumination but now for a used car lot, to anti-tank barricades disguised as flower planters still in use. The most monumental remnant of the border is probably the vacuum it left behind, visible over long stretches: the emptiness produced by its demolition large vacant spaces on prime real estate in the city centre though to perfectly linear paths of the former patrol road lined by new growth vegetation stretching to the horizon at the countryside on the city extremities.

Using the Berliner Mauerweg as my primary guide I set out to cycle the ~160km of the former Wall’s path and see traces remaining there today. Yet my pursuit quickly devolved into something else: a gentle four day ride on a borrowed bike turned into a several week mission involving archives, museums, history books, autobiographies, conversations with government officials and with strangers. Following the officially signposted Berliner Mauerweg and then taking detours based on the evidence I stumbled across, experiencing the interstices not discussed by the tourist and general history guides, to look at the Berlin today 20 years after the fall of the wall, to feel the distance of pedal on ground.

The official path often deviated from the obvious and still passable path of the Wall: to take safer paved routes and pass by urban transit interchanges, to avoid the car parks and similarly designed supermarkets recently built on the Mauergrundstücke, a new autobahn taking advantage of a very long straight void left along the Spree, via new bridges over rejoined and re-laid railways and roads, new houses and schools. While large sections as the route still utilise the guard patrol road laid between inter and outer walls, successive layers of tarmac piled onto the concrete slabs.

The void of the cleared death-strip takes various appearances: in the south of Berlin it is indeed largely empty bar a camel sanctuary and monuments commemorating the fallen – only a few types of grass are growing on the sand that was drenched in herbicides for several decades. In the north, however, there is a dense growth of young trees over long stretches of the former border alongside lakes and many new developments.

As the kilometres ticked along, I realised, that in following the Berliner Mauerweg tourist trail I have avoided/neglected exploring “East” Berlin any deeper than the Mauergrundstücke, and in doing so, enacted the very GDR propaganda explaining the Wall’s purported purpose: to keep West Germans and other Fascists out of the GDR.

Grounds (Berliner Mauer) is the result of a research residency in Simon Faithfull’s Mobile Research Unit no.1 at Skulpturenpark Berlin, August 2009. First published in You Are Here on Broken Dimanche Press

m@itakephotos.co.uk