Wall Jumpers
This dissertation began its inception at the site of many tales; some tragic, some triumphant. However, the one constant character in the above photo-essay is a wall, namely the Berlin Wall. Although these tales are not explicitly linked, photographers and protagonists alike have been repeatedly drawn to the section of wall at Sebastianstrasse.
Not captured - at least by photograph - was the tale of Siegfried Noffke and Dieter Hötger, the ‘escape helpers’ who in 1962 dug a 30m long tunnel beneath Sebastianstrasse and the death strip separating East and West Berlin. Paradoxically, the men were digging their way out of the encircled ‘freedom’ of the Western ‘interior’ and into the Eastern ‘exterior’, in order to free their trapped wives. This however, resulted in tragedy after a relative informed the Stazi of the escape plans. After weeks of tunneling, the men broke through into the cellar of a Berolina ‘Plattenbau’ apartment block in the East, only to be greeted by armed officers.
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This dissertation began its inception at the site of many tales; some tragic, some triumphant. However, the one constant character in the above photo-essay is a wall, namely the Berlin Wall. Although these tales are not explicitly linked, photographers and protagonists alike have been repeatedly drawn to the section of wall at Sebastianstrasse.
Not captured - at least by photograph - was the tale of Siegfried Noffke and Dieter Hötger, the ‘escape helpers’ who in 1962 dug a 30m long tunnel beneath Sebastianstrasse and the death strip separating East and West Berlin. Paradoxically, the men were digging their way out of the encircled ‘freedom’ of the Western ‘interior’ and into the Eastern ‘exterior’, in order to free their trapped wives. This however, resulted in tragedy after a relative informed the Stazi of the escape plans. After weeks of tunneling, the men broke through into the cellar of a Berolina ‘Plattenbau’ apartment block in the East, only to be greeted by armed officers.
...
And it was inevitable to realise that all these expressions – the fanaticism of the tunnel diggers; the resignation of those left behind; the desperate attempts to celebrate conventional occasions, such as marriage, across the divide - were finally too applicable to architecture itself. The Berlin Wall was a very graphic demonstration of the power of architecture and some of its unpleasant consequences. Were not division, enclosure (i.e., imprisonment), and exclusion – which defined the wall’s performance and explained its efficiency – the essential stratagems of any architecture? (Koolhaas:1995, p. 226) |