An ingenious reinvention of the Berlin Wall was unveiled at the Brandenburg Gate on Thursday as the German capital remembered its dark day of division 65 years ago.
Early on August 13th, 1961, Berlin’s soft sectoral divide became an impenetrable Cold War barrier of barbed wire and bricks that would claim 140 lives before it was breached, peacefully, 28 years later.
Artist Hubertus Hamm’s wall installation – 30 metres long and three metres high – comprises a vast network of aluminium tubes that resembles a giant beehive and distorts the view on the other side.
In the Thursday sunshine, fascinated people waved to family and friends on the other side, unwittingly echoing the desperate gestures of separated families caught off guard by the overnight division of their city 65 years earlier.
Black and white photographs capture their desperate plight in an open-air exhibition at the Brandenburg Gate, the city landmark cut off for nearly three decades in the death-strip between socialist East Berlin and capitalist West Berlin.
