Germany as a nation has gone through traumatic and horrible times, and the people in charge have at times done traumatic and horrible things to their own citizens and others’. In this way Germany is exactly like every other nation state I know of. But as I’ve mentioned before, what sets it apart from many of those other states is its determination to honestly, doggedly, and publicly engage those awful episodes–because Germans IMHO seem to get that to move past something you have to go through it rather than around it: that includes the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin Wall Memorial Museum may be a slightly West-centric presentation of the traumas associated with the Wall, but it achieves an impressively comprehensive and deep examination in relatively small compass–a roughly 1 km-long stretch of the Wall’s former path along Bernauer Strasse and an accompanying visitor’s center, where I was particularly moved by this Handshape artwork. Its organizers molded 10,957 pieces of clay (one for every day the wall stood) between the hands of two strangers who met for the first time at the memorial, told each other their stories, found some common ground between them, and concretized it with the clay handshake. The clay “handshapes” have been strung into a new sort of wall that represents, rather than division, the protection created by common ground and community.
The Rookery 