Jelisaveta Ostrovska

An Unobstructed Eye

1. Ruinenfront: the houses along the sector border on Bernauer Strasse belonged to East Berlin, the pavement in front of them — to West Berlin. To prevent potential escapes, on September 20th, 1961, East Berlin orders to evict and relocate tenants from these apartments. The houses stood empty, with doors and windows walled-in, well into the 1960s. 

2. 120 000 potential violators: at the time when the Berlin Wall was built, more than 120 000 East Berliners worked and lived in direct proximity from the border.

3.  The S-Bahn boycott: of 500 000 West Berlin’s passengers, only 100 000 were still using the S-Bahn trains. To cope with the boycott, West Berlin’s BVG built bus routes and extended the U-Bahn lines parallel to the S-Bahn lines.  

4.  Border-crossing permits: a border-pass agreement between the West Berlin Senate and the East Berlin authorities allowed West Berliners to visit their relatives over Christmas and New Year 1963/64 for the first time since the Wall was built. Between 19 December and 5 January, 1.2 million visits were registered. Agreements for 2-3 week-long visits followed in 1964-66. Until 1972, the visits were not allowed. Only pensioners, who were of “no use for the economy”, could travel from East Berlin to West Berlin. 

5. Otfried Reck: on November 27th 1962, at the corner of Invalidenstrasse and Gartenstrasse, Otfried Reck and his friend Gerd P., who were often hanging around the nearby skating rink, climb into the ventilation shaft. Their plan was to reach the other side of the city by following the underground tracks of the north-west railroad. Gerd P. later reported that they had grown up together in the Mitte district and when they were children used to play on the railroad grounds, and that they had occasionally climbed through the shaft to the tracks. This time they planned to use a red-painted flashlight to wave down a passing train headed for West Berlin. The fleeing border violator was shot at the skating rink.

6. The Church of Reconciliation is blown up: from 1961 until 1985, the empty church stood walled-in between East and West Berlin, its tower used as an observation point by the border guards. It was demolished in January 1985. The Chapel of Reconciliation was built on its place in 1999.

Collage, 2019