The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Berlin — the Wall at Bornholmer Straße and the Brandenburg Gate

November 9, 1989 — the night the checkpoints opened and the city climbed the wall

The wall was the architecture of enforced forgetting: a state that split families down the middle and bet that thirty years would erase ever having been whole. The night it fell, people who had been ordered to forget each other walked through the gap and remembered. Read every recovered fragment through this: the breach removes the concrete standing in front of a memory — it does not invent the memory. Whatever the subject carried out was already theirs, waiting behind the wall the regime built in front of it.

From the record

floodlights along the wall turn the night white
the chant rolls against the concrete — 'Tor auf!' — open the gate
the Mauerspechte — the wall-peckers — swing hammers and chisels, chips flying off the concrete
champagne bottles pass hand to hand through the crowd, the corks long lost
at the Bornholmer Straße crossing, the guards stand aside as the barrier rises
people are standing on top of the wall at the Brandenburg Gate, pulling strangers up to join them

The era door

raw concrete, spray paint bleeding up through its grain

BERLIN — NOVEMBER 9, 1989

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

Other records in the Almanac

The whole Almanac →

MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037