Reichstag 1990 © Karl-Ludwig Lange

6 November 2009 to 9 May 2010

On 4 November at 18 hrs, an exhibition of large-format photographs by Karl-Ludwig Lange entitled The Divided City – Topography of the Berlin Wall will open at the German Bundestag. This will be the first exhibition held in the room of the Wall Memorial in the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Building, where pieces of the Berlin Wall, preserved by Ben Wagin, have been positioned by architect Stephan Braunfels exactly where the Wall used to run. Beneath the Bundestag Library in the heart of the parliamentary district, and close to where the River Spree once divided East and West, a powerful Wall Memorial has thus been developed in remembrance of the many people who died at this border, victims of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) regime in the GDR.

Karl-Ludwig Lange’s photographs extend and enhance the visitor’s understanding of the consequences of the construction of the Berlin Wall. The photographs date from the years immediately following the opening of the Wall, and show the wounds the Wall inflicted on the face of Berlin. Just as the remnants which make up the Wall Memorial cut painfully into the architecture of the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Building like a foreign body, the no-man’s-land and death strips can be seen slicing through an organic cityscape in Karl-Ludwig Lange’s photographs. These photographs are a warning against forgetting this inhuman dividing line which ran through the heart of a densely populated, living city. In conjunction with the powerful Wall Memorial, the exhibition raises and intensifies the visitor’s awareness that freedom is not a gift which can be taken for granted, but rather is always endangered or at risk of restriction, and must be defended and preserved at all times. In striving for this fundamental aspect of a dignified human existence, many people lost their lives at the Wall - a Wall at the heart of Berlin and the heart of Germany.

Opening:

4 November 2009 at 18.00 hrs

Exhibition venue

The Wall Memorial in the Marie-Elisabeth Lüders Building
Access via the Spreeside promenade opposite the Reichstag Building
Schiffbauerdamm, 10117 Berlin

Opening times

6 November 2009 to 9 May 2010

from Friday to Sunday from 11.00 to 17.00 hrs

Admission: free of charge.