5:00AM Monday June 23, 2008
By Kate Connolly
Checkpoint Charlie could become the site of Europe's first Cold War museum, following a plea by some of the most significant figures of the post-World War II era, which divided the continent into capitalist West and communist East.
Former Presidents, Foreign Ministers and ambassadors have written an open statement to the German Government. They say that, almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, memories are fading fast, despite the art-house success of films such as Good Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others, both set in communist East Berlin.
Vaclav Havel, the former Czech President, former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Germany's former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and the former United States Ambassador to Germany John Kornblum are among those appealing for "the establishment of a Cold War museum" to "safeguard for the long term the memory of the division of Europe and its liberation". Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has also given his backing to the project.
As the most famous crossing-point between East and West Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie has been suggested as the most appropriate site for a museum dedicated to lives on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The appeal, published in the Suddeutsche Zeitung, comes at a time when Berlin is beginning to regret the initial rush to do away with one of history's ugliest symbols of repression. City authorities have faced mounting complaints that most of the Wall and its accompanying watchtowers have disappeared, mostly pulverised and used for road building. Critics argue that information is too scarce for many to properly grasp what the Cold War was all about.
Interest in the East of the past has even extended to opening prefabricated flats of the era as mini-museums.
But more and more Cold War remnants are being lost to make way for new developments. This week the capital commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Berlin airlift, when the Western allies broke a Soviet blockade to deliver supplies to the city. Veterans of the almost year-long airlift - now in their eighties and nineties - who landed planes laden with everything from sweets to coal every 90 seconds - will gather at Berlin's Tempelhof airport. But Tempelhof will close in the autumn, to make way for a new international hub.
Little remains of the 165km Berlin Wall, which lasted for 28 years, dividing the city and leading to the deaths of at least 133 people. Although tourists in a recent survey voted it the sight they most wanted to see, even some Berliners are at a loss to remember where it ran. More of the Wall is on display elsewhere - at the Vatican, the Imperial War Museum, the United Nations - than in Berlin.
Apart from a few stretches, such as the now crumbling 1362m-long East Side, on which 106 artists have painted their work and which is soon to receive a facelift, the most prominent "Wall reminder" is an easily-missed cobblestone strip to show where it once went.
A museum, say the politicians, would help to counteract what some critics call a "Disneyfication process".
- OBSERVER
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