GERMAN UNIFICATION IN 1990 ARRIVED with high expectations and big promises. Chancellor Helmut Kohl predicted “blooming landscapes” for the former GDR, and in the early euphoria of unity the path forward seemed clear to many: the victorious liberal democracy of the Federal Republic would extend itself over its defeated Socialist rival, and a nation arbitrarily divided by the legacies of the Nazi era and the vicissitudes of the Cold War would grow together again.

In reality unification turned out to be a much more conflictual affair. Economic crisis rather than blossoming affluence promptly enveloped the former GDR, bringing with it a variety of accompanying social and political problems. The government’s attempts to address these and other pitfalls linked to the GDR’s legacies fueled disputes and divisions, particularly between former East and West Germans, Ossis and Wessis. The sources of controversy were many: subsidies and transfer payments aimed at resuscitating eastern Germany’s moribund economy, attempts to return private property nationalized under Communist rule to its previous owners, efforts to grapple with the Stasi’s toxic legacy and to prosecute East German officeholders and functionaries for various actions defined as criminal. Yet ultimately unified Germany’s east-west divisions were rooted in something deeper and more fundamental: clashing self-perceptions, memories, and mentalities. Although the militarized boundary that had divided the two Germanys had been dismantled, Peter Schneider’s prediction about its most visible and symbolic section proved prescient: the “Wall in [the] heads” between former Ossis and Wessis was to take much “longer to tear down” than the concrete structure of the Berlin Wall itself. The wall continued to haunt and divide unified Germany in general and Berlin in particular long after its physical disappearance.

This chapter will examine the public commemoration of the wall in postunification Berlin. These efforts and the accompanying controversies are important in themselves as a key factor in the evolution of the public remembrance of the GDR at a crucial site of recent German memory. But they also illustrate the broader trajectory through which the commemoration of the GDR evolved in the two decades following German unification. The initial rush to unity yielded a wave of Western triumphalism that translated into a sustained prioritization of the western perspective on the wall, reflected in part in a tendency to sweep the barrier aside as quickly and comprehensively as possible.