Last year a museum owner named Alexandra Hildebrandt set up a phony, white-painted Berlin Wall and 1065 crosses on vacant land across from the old Checkpoint Charlie, as a memorial to the 1000 or so people killed by East-German soldiers while they tried to escape to the west. She'd leased this land from the BAG Bank. When her lease was up, the bank wanted it back. She decided not to move. A monument to the victims of Communism was too important to the city of Berlin, she said. But she failed to raise enough cash to buy the land. She made herself noisy and inconvenient; she called for help from such prominent anti-Communists as George W. Bush; she had Christlike protesters chain themselves to the crosses. She even fooled some kneejerk types into treating her memorial as one of history's final victims of Communist persecution. But in the end nothing could stop the bulldozers, or the crane that hauled away pieces of an all-too-familiar wall.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
2:59 PM
