Berlin Wall, 1989, by Juan Luis Chulilla

From MemoryArchive

Who: Juan Luis Chulilla
What: Berlin Wall
When: August 1989
Where: Zicherie, between former East and West Germany

I worked in a volunteer's field work in Zicherie just before the fall of the wall. I had to go to my work (an Oak plantation) along the border for four miles. In the margins there where here and there memorials of the people who tried to cross the fence. Besides, the actual village of Zicherie was divided by the wall.

A section of 100 meter wide of the village was abandoned and VoPo posts where each 100 meters or so. If you walk too near to the wall, you were advised first by voice and then you were aimed by the guardsman with his rifle.

There were two villages with the same name, one at each side of the border. Communication between sides, as far as I knew, was not possible.

The main point of this memory is that this situation seemed at that time to be almost eternal, without any realistic possibility of change in a good number of years. All the surroundings, the landscape, the disposition of space and the arrangements of daily life seemed to be stable, very stable.

Ten weeks after, Berlin Wall fell.

I had to adjust my recent memory with the images of TV.

My main lesson of this memory: reality is less stable that it seems, even when looks immutable.