Documentation Center and Viewing Platform

The Parish of Reconciliation gave most of this house to the memorial foundation, and the Berlin Wall Documentation Center grew here out of a small exhibition about one Berlin street. Inside, the former worship hall can still be recognized. The large windows on the second floor remain, and a viewing tower has been added to the building, continuing their direction across the border strip.

On August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one, ninety-seven percent of the parishioners of the Protestant Parish of Reconciliation were cut off from their church. They lived in Wedding, in West Berlin, while the church stood across the street, already in East Berlin. Border guards bricked up the entrance, set up an observation post in the building, and stored equipment there. Weddings, baptisms, funerals, and Sunday services had to be moved to other people's premises.

At the end of nineteen sixty-two, the church council decided to build a temporary parish house here. The keys were handed over to the parishioners three years later. On the second floor was a worship hall with large windows facing the inaccessible church. The direction of the windows was chosen deliberately: people hoped that one day they would cross the street and return to their church.

The temporary parish house had to be used for thirty years. From its windows, parishioners could see the church tower inside the border strip. In January nineteen eighty-five, there was nowhere left to return to: first the church hall was demolished, then the tower was blown up. The parish continued to gather here, in the building at one hundred eleven Bernauer Straße.

After the fall of the Wall, the parish retained this house but gave most of its rooms over to telling the story of what had happened across the street. On November ninth, nineteen ninety-nine, a small exhibition called Border Views opened here. The association that created it had little money, so it began with the story of one street: the closed church, divided families, escapes, and the border's construction. The Berlin Wall Documentation Center grew out of this exhibition. The former worship hall can still be made out inside; the parish retained its own room, office, and small kitchen, and leases the building to the memorial foundation.

The viewing tower was added in two thousand three. It continued the same view for which parishioners had once made the windows on the second floor. From above, you can now see the full width of the border complex—the outer wall, the strip between the barriers, the patrol road, and the inner wall. The church toward which the old windows faced no longer exists in this space.