Thursday, March 5
The designs submitted from April for an outdoor exhibition at Checkpoint Charlie will probably not be realised until 2029 at the earliest. However, the competition itself is another initiative to make the tourist spot that some consider a cheap attraction into a place for people to learn about the site’s incredible history.
Over the years, there have been various procedures to develop Checkpoint Charlie, including an urban planning dialogue procedure and a cultural dialogue procedure. Often, these did not work out due to funding being withdrawn or the site being sold and resold by investors.
However, since 2022, Checkpoint Charlie is owned by the state once more. Now there is a new initiative: to make it a place of remembrance with an outdoor exhibit. Director of the Berlin Wall Foundation Axel Klausmeier stated, “Memory needs places, but these places also need time to be developed and that time has now come.”
The ‘free space planning realization competition’ will start in April, in which landscape architects and exhibition designers will make proposals and submit concepts, with winning project decided in autumn.
Because Berlin has no money for a real museum in this place, an outdoor exhibition should tell the story in outlines to be financed by the federal and state governments. 2029 has been announced as an optimistic estimate of the exhibit’s opening.
Susanne Muhle, project manager of the Berlin Wall Foundation, hopes for Checkpoint Charlie to become a meeting place: “Here people from home and abroad, tourists, Berliners, young and old should talk to each other about their experiences and ideas about the Cold War and the after-effects that we feel to the present day.”
