It is the late 1980s. The Berlin Wall is still intact, defined as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall“ by the East German authorities. This will soon change.
In this photo, that concept of the Berlin Wall being a protective “anti-Fascist barrier“ seems visually to be valid. This site in West Berlin , on “Wilhelmstraße“, was the former torture center of the Gestapo, sealed off from East Berlin by the Wall facing West Berlin. The Nazi torture center, a symbol of evil that the East Germans thought they could keep out with a wall.
But the context of an “Anti-Fascist Wall“ separating Berlin into East and West would also be confirmed by the fact that this informative sign about the Gestapo site in the West was constantly attacked/damaged by Fascist-fans and ultra-Nationalists in West Berlin who did not want to be reminded of the dark side of Nazi history and German Nationalism. In West Germany, a Nazi past or Nazi sympathy were no barrier to a successful career, quite the opposite. People of that era who “betrayed“ the Vaterland, like Berthold Brecht, or all the young West Germans who came to West Berlin to avoid the German military draft were ordered to disappear to the East-side of the Wall, according to the general reaction in West German media at a time of rising leftist movements.
Adjacent to this site stands a building, „Deutschlandhaus“, where members of the BdV “ Berlin Landesverband der Vertriebenen“ (“Organisation of the Exiled Germans“) is located. It still exists as the organisation of Germans who formerly lived in areas that were claimed by Nazi Germany or populated by Germans before national borders were changed after WW2 and they left or were expelled as Nazi sympathizers.
This organisation has the reputation of holding extreme right-wing views, and revisionist concepts of German history. Their website writes of “massacres” committed by the Soviet Red Army and Partisans fighting Nazi Germany. It was and still is funded by the Federal German Government, 81 years after the end of WW2.
That large building in the background formally served as the headquarters for the Nazi Wehrmacht Chief, Hermann Göring. After 1989, the Federal Economic Ministry moved in. The former Greek Economic Minister , Yanis Varoufakis, came to Berlin to have a show-down with German Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, there in 2015 to negotiate the alleged debts owed by Greece to Germany. He vividly describes the “toxic atmosphere“ of the place, in this video clip , where he also explains that the “Euro“ is actually the old “German-Mark“. Germany now has an economic power over Europe that the Nazis could only dream about.
It is mid-2026. The Wall at this site is still intact. East Germany, the State that called itself the “New Germany”, is now gone: its former leader, Erich Honnecker, after being imprisoned in the exact same jail in West Berlin in which he was held as a Communist during Nazi times, is now dead.
West Germany cleverly did NOT “develop“ this centrally located property as they usually did post-1989 with most public properties. Financial corruption had ripped a hole in the Berlin government budget in the late 1990s, which accelerated the sale of public property to vulture Capitalists speculating on real estate prices. For this property the government decided to use its historic significance for their so-called “remembrance culture“, re-naming the site “Topography of Terror“, with a museum and exhibition about the Nazi era. The West German authorities did not tear down the Berlin Wall here, since it then served as a useful symbol to emphasize West German propaganda associating Hitler’s Germany and the East German Democratic Republic as being the “two dictatorships“ of German history. The “Anti-Fascist Wall“ suddenly metamorphosized into a symbol equated with Nazi Fascism. For “re-unified” Germany.
A history written by the “victors“. The “dictatorship-of-private-property“ now rules over re-united Berlin, and the terror persists in other forms. Ask Palestine, which has been decimated thanks to German weaponry provided to Israel for its genocide. For the first time since WW2 a weapons factory is being constructed in Berlin by Rheinmetall, whose profits have soared over the last 3 years. Ask Greece racked by austerity/privatisation, or Yanis Varoufakis, or anybody trying to find a roof over their head to rent in Berlin today, where real estate specualtion has decimated neighbourhoods.
Currently the extreme-right party, AfD “Alternative for Deutschland” is polling at record highs. Especially in former East Germany, but even in all of Germany the polls have pegged them as the strongest party, leading the current conservative Christian Democrats of Chancellor Merz. This is a party whose leader, Alexander Gauland, dismissed traditional attention on Germany’s Fascist history, simply calling the Nazi era “just a piece of pigeon-poop” in relation to “1000 years of successful German history”.
1000 years of successful history? Does that sound familiar to anyone? Berlin and Germany remain a mine-field of dangerous memories.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jan Ralske.