Berlin Wall Memorial

This guide to the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse turns on August 22, 1961, when a fifty-eight-year-old woman named Ida Siekmann leapt from her fourth-floor window rather than accept that her own front door had overnight become a border crossing. You'll hear about the desperate window escapes that followed, the East German guards who bricked up doorways and bulldozed houses in response, and a tunnel that began forming beneath these very streets months later. Walk the preserved strip in front of you, where the ground still hides what was dug beneath it.