Nowhere and never again did the concept of FREEDOM come so close to me as it did on Bernauer Straße. I attended a Verdi seminar in Berlin Wannsee on the topic of "The Berlin Wall – its effects from then until today." I had arrived without any particular expectations, and as a West German, I had no concrete ideas about the lives of people in the GDR. The seminar consisted of
Among other things, from many walks through Berlin along the former Wall; there was always something to say about the people and the respective district we passed through. We also went to Bernauer Straße, the border between the Berlin districts of Wedding and Mitte. The construction of the Wall and its consequences for the residents were experienced particularly dramatically here. The Wall divided a street right through the middle and with it the living space of the people who lived there. Day after day, they experienced how their freedom was restricted, how they were literally walled in, how the destruction of urban space and ways of life, the separation from family members and friends, was accelerated. And they could do nothing about it! The despair was so great that some people threw themselves out of windows. I cried. Everything had played out as documented here: some were walled in and glazed over, we in the West were free and busy with the economic miracle. Since this seminar, I have been grateful for my free life, for free elections, for an undisturbed life in freedom!
