Another advocate for preservation was Manfred Fischer, who remains the Pastor of the Church of Reconciliation that once lay in the path of the wall. "He literally sometimes stood in front of the wall preventing bulldozers from removing it, saying we have to have a commemoration, a memorial," explains Harrison.

For a long time, Germans argued that commemorating victims of the GDR regime would mean downplaying those that suffered under the Holocaust - for many, the latter was a far more serious historical legacy.

But the impasse on how to appropriately memorialise victims of these two 20th century dictatorships was finally resolved via a resolution in
the German Federal Parliament in 2008.

"They basically said, we can commemorate both without downplaying the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and without belittling the crimes of the East German regime," says Harrison.

With money already allocated by Federal and State governments to better preserve vestiges of the wall, and to create a more significant memorial for the victims, the real work of reconciling this past, so often avoided by Berliners, could begin - nearly 20 years after the Iron Curtain folded.

The 'death strip'

Bernauer Strasse [street] in central Berlin was a key watermark throughout the 28-year history of the Berlin Wall. This was the scene of the infamous moment - captured on film - where a defecting East German guard, Conrad Schumann, leapt across the barbed wire of a fledgling wall into the promise of West Berlin.

Here also, desperate East Berliners jumped out of their apartment windows into the West - until their escape hatches were bricked up.
Later, in 1985, the towering, neo-gothic Church of Reconciliation, a monument long stranded in the "Soviet occupation zone" on the Bernauer Strasse "death strip", was razed - since, used as an observation tower and visible from the West, the symbol of the church-turned-military base was seemingly bad PR for the regime - the aforementioned Pastor Fischer, overseas at the time, was not even told his marooned church was to be flattened.

The Polster family too lived up the road from Bernauer Strasse, along the same stretch of wall - meaning Polster's father, a policeman, could easily, often late at night, attend to trouble on the border. This was a few blocks up from where the first wall crossing opened so exuberantly in 1989.

Some traces of the wall survived in Bernauer Strasse, due in part to the work of Pastor Fischer, who built a new church on the site of the one he lost. There, amid remnants of the main wall, and the smaller inner walls that sectioned "the death strip", Fischer established the first Berlin Wall Memorial in 1998.

But what was a humble memorial site has become a major city monument in recent years as government and citizens have come around to the idea of commemorating the wall.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel, attends the 50th anniversary commemoration of Mauerbau ["wall building"], a large second stage of the memorial will be unveiled as a symbol that the city has begun to reconcile this past - compared, however, with the extravagant 20 year fall of the wall celebrations nearly two years ago, this event will remain relatively circumspect.

Reconstruction?

Axel Klausmeier is the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, which manages the Berlin Wall Memorial. From his third floor office, you look directly across at arguably the most pristine section of the wall, including an original guard-tower - one of only a couple that survived the wall's rapid deconstruction.

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