Window of Remembrance: The Faces of the Wall
Why is it significant?
In front of you stands a long wall of rust-coloured steel, divided into small windows, and in almost every window a face looks back at you. Young men in sports jackets, a woman with neat grey hair, teenagers, soldiers in uniform... and here and there, a window with no picture at all.
Key Facts
| Place | Window of Remembrance: The Faces of the Wall |
|---|---|
| Address | Bernauer Straße, 10115 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53400, 13.38900 |
| Part of Walk | The Wall on Bernauer Straße: Escapes, Tunnels and the Mauerpark in Berlin |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you stands a long wall of rust-coloured steel, divided into small windows, and in almost every window a face looks back at you. Young men in sports jackets, a woman with neat grey hair, teenagers, soldiers in uniform... and here and there, a window with no picture at all.
This is the Window of Remembrance, opened in 2010 as part of the Berlin Wall Memorial. Each window holds a name, dates and, where one survives, a photograph of a person who died at the Berlin Wall. The empty frames are for those of whom no picture has ever been found. Take a moment to read a few of the names; most visitors walk past too fast.
Their stories are not all the same, and that is part of what makes this place so powerful. Most were people trying to escape: shot in the strip, drowned in the Spree or the canals, fallen from windows and roofs. Some were border soldiers, killed by escapers or by their own comrades. And some never meant to cross at all, like children from West Berlin who fell into the river at the border and drowned because no one was allowed, or dared, to pull them out.
The youngest was a baby boy, just fifteen months old, who suffocated in 1973 while his parents were trying to smuggle him through a checkpoint hidden in a truck. The last man shot dead at the Wall was Chris Gueffroy, aged twenty, in February 1989. Just one month later Winfried Freudenberg fell to his death when his homemade gas balloon crashed. Eight months after that, the Wall was open.
The ground around here has its own sad history. Much of it once belonged to the old cemetery of the Sophien parish, whose northern edge the border troops took for the death strip. So the dead of the Wall are remembered on land that was taken from the dead. Now turn away from the street and walk a few steps south into the quiet cemetery itself, among the trees and old gravestones.