Fifty years ago today, the Berlin Wall was erected in haste across the bleeding heart of Germany's capital. The sudden and speedy construction of this East-West divide on the night of August 13, 1961, caught many Berliners by surprise, and those that tried - with increasing futility - to circumvent the barrier often became its victim.

These victims - not only those killed or imprisoned trying to cross the wall, but families separated by the partition for more than a generation – are commemorated at a newly upgraded Berlin Wall Memorial. With the German chancellor and president attending such a memorial for the first time, it is an unprecedented act of remembrance since, while Berliners have been happy to celebrate the fall of the wall, most have wanted to forget about its construction.

From the moment the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, Berliners not only rejoiced, but also quickly tried to remove every trace of their so-called Schandmauer, or "Wall of Shame".

"It was like, grab a hammer and knock it down. Get rid of this, just tear it down," remembers Martin Hirsch, only a teenager at the time. From what he can recall, no-one gave much thought to preserving any of the wall, or commemorating it.

Hirsch was born in West Berlin, but his parents had escaped into the enclave city from East Germany in the late 1950s. When the wall went up in August 1961 - an act of desperation by the GDR regime to stem the daily exodus of 1,500 East Germans into the West - Hirsch's grandmother was caught in the East. Though his father was later able to pay US diplomats to smuggle her to the West in the boot of a car, other family members never made it. By 1989, the Hirschs couldn't wait to purge their wall.

But from the other side of the wall, some felt differently. "My mother cried for hours when the wall fell," says Norbert Polster, a 37-year-old East Berlin native who spent his first 16 years in an apartment that faced the wall. His mother had worked faithfully for East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) and loved her country. "She was very sad. With the wall gone she lost her beliefs, her life, her job," says Polster.

Polster's mother, who has remained unemployed since the GDR regime collapsed, will not commemorate August 13. "It's not just one day. She spends her whole life thinking about it," he says.

The politics of remembrance

Hope Harrison, associate professor of history at George Washington University, was flying to Berlin from New York the day the wall fell. Unaware of the sudden turn of events, she listened, stunned, as the pilot announced that they "were about to fly into history".

Then working on her PhD, Harrison soon scoured newly accessible Soviet and East German archives to write a definitive history of the politics behind the building of the wall. Today she is back in Berlin, and is trying to understand the recent shift in Berlin's approach to the wall's commemoration.

"It went from: 'Get rid of it, we never want to hear about it again'; to: 'Wait a minute, this is a really important part of our history and we need to remember it and teach our children and our grandchildren about it'," says Harrison.

"The wall was literally standing in the way of connecting streets, and metro stations, and canals, and rivers. On both sides the feeling was: 'Let's rebuild the city of Berlin, let's look to the future and not the past.'"

In 1990, only a few Berliners fought to preserve parts of the wall. Prominent among them was Willy Brandt - Mayor of West Berlin when the wall was built, and later West German Chancellor - who was convinced that future generations would forget the wall's significance once it was gone. Few listened to him.

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