Ubiquitous
Fragment of the Berlin Wall
Rainer Hoenniger 3132067
The prospect of digging into the history of an object to find some story behind it and then having the challenge of conveying the story in an excitable way produces an immense sense of satisfaction. You feel as though you are an explorer on a mission to find the one place man has never been, to tell the story of the adventures you’ve been on along the way. As well as this thrill, I want to build on my capabilities in my academic writing, research and my ability to construct and communicate understandings from a variety of sources. I want to use this project to understand a means of generating ideas for design, to theorize and to appreciate the different cultural elements. With regards to Task One “Ubiquitous”, I was thinking of a particular object that while no one particularly owned it previously, it has a huge social significance to my family. I am talking about a piece of the Berlin Wall. Half of my family is German, the other half English South African. My Ouma and Oupa had to cross the Berlin borders just before the wall was erected. Both their families were never to be heard of again, until the wall came down. So the story will explore the way in which the wall separated the family and now reminds my family of what once was.
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia.com
Ubiquitous objects must be very important and of great value to the owner. They carry significant memories of how everyday life was lived in different periods of time and social contexts. This is true of my ubiquitous object, a piece of the Berlin Wall.
My family is half German, from my dad’s side. I was born in South Africa, Johannesburg. My father was born in East Germany in a barn. He and his family, namely my grand parents were trying their utmost not to be found by the Russian Infantry while escaping the communistic grasp of the east. When the Russians entered Germany my Grand mother was on her way to work, at the dairy. When she got home from her hard days labour, her family was nowhere to be found. That’s right; the whole family disappeared never to be heard of again. We can only assume they were taken by the Russians.
My grandfather was an engineer on a boat during the war and was captured by the English along with many of the German Navy. When he was released as a P.O.W. after the war and went back to Berlin to find my grandmother and make another baby (my Aunt). She was only 6 months old and my dad 3 years old, when they decided they would risk their lives to make their way across to West Germany. Evidently they seemed to have made it across into West Germany and then onwards to South Africa, but that’s another story.
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia.com
Construction of the 45 km wall around West Berlin began early on Sunday, the 13th august 1961 in East Berlin. That morning the boundary had been sealed by East German troops. Thousands of people were slaughtered when they tried to escape through, over or under the Berlin Wall. Only a lucky few have ever made it through thanks to its ingenious design. It consists a concrete wall, rows of barbed wire, no mans land, guard towers, check points and another concrete wall as illustrated in the pictures. The barrier was built by East German workers, not directly involving the Soviets and it was built slightly inside East German territory to ensure that it did not protrude on West Berlin at any point; if one stood next to the West Berlin side of the Wall, one was actually standing on East Berlin soil. Some streets running alongside the barrier were torn up to make them too rough for most vehicles, and a barbed-wire fence was erected, which was later built up into the full-scale Wall. During the construction of the Wall, soldiers stood in front of it with orders to shoot anyone who attempted to defect. Additionally, the whole length of the border between East and West Germany was closed with chain-fences, walls, and minefields. (Wikipedia, 2007) Many families were split. Many East Berliners were cut off from their jobs and from chances for financial improvement; West Berlin became an isolated in a hostile land. West Berliners demonstrated against the wall, led by the mayor Willy Brandt, who strongly criticised the United States for failing to respond. Allied intelligence agencies had thought about a wall to stop the flood of refugees but the main candidate for its location was around the perimeter of the city.
How exactly does this relate to Ubiquitous Design you might ask. Why, it’s clear as present day, the Wall. Yes, the Berlin Wall other wise know as the Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart. I procured a piece of it when I was 5 or 6, from a poor old man on the side of the road in Berlin, though it was illegal to sell pieces of the wall after it came down. I guess we as a family didn’t think much of it, more of a souvenir than anything meaningful. At that point in my life we were living in Holland, Den Haag, and Germany being just a stones through away on the autobahn meant that we could race over on weekends pretty much whenever we wanted to. My dad had received a letter from my dads long lost cousin on his fathers side the family. They wanted to meet with us and share their life stories. I myself found these people to be very boring as I did not speak German at the time nor did I have anything to share with them. When we did however visit them, we found our life to be similar
and dissimilar at the same time, for example; they had a car to, a Trabant other wise known as the Trabi; these were basically a woollen/resin chassis stuck onto a two stroke motorbike engine. Dad had a 1990 Ford Mustang red convertible. They lived on a small farm like thing, with two pigs, a goat and a horse for pulling the plough. We lived in a four storey house complete with pool table, 3 TVs, heating and a veggie patch. So you see, this little piece of wall symbolizes the gap it created through the process of being erected by the Communists and disassembled by David Hasslehoff.
When we were reunited with my father’s cousin, because of the gap that had formed between the two generations there wasn’t actually that much to say, it was “worse than talking to strangers” Bernd Hoenniger (personal communication, July 2, 1999) as my father put it, because we were family yet had absolutely nothing in common. We knew we should get along and play happy family but there was nothing there that we could relate to, other than the fact we had the same last name.
Life on the east side Wall was also appalling. My Dad asked his cousin about their experiences through their hardships and they told him that during Christmas, the government gave every person a present to show their appreciation. “Nothing wrong with that!” you say. Well everyone got an orange for Christmas. If you wanted a car, your choices were either a Trabi or a Trabi. That was it. Further more it took as long as 12 years to get one after ordering. You as a person were not aloud to own money and were only aloud to use coupons to buy food. You could only have one loaf of bread per week per family and one sack of potatoes, etc. you could not get tomatoes or bananas or watermelon. If you did want to get bread you would have to wait in line for over 9 hours and sometimes when you got to the end of the line there was none left, such were the hardships of East Germany.
Image Courtesy of Wikimedia.com
Thousands of people were slaughtered when they tried to escape through, over or under the Berlin Wall. Only a lucky few have ever made it through thanks to its ingenious design. I guess in a way today this little piece of the wall that I have is a reminder of what our family has been through. My grand father died before I was born and my grandmother died two years ago. I had never asked them about those days because it was never really relevant and I had no understanding of the situation. It was as if we still needed a reminder regarding the disadvantages they were dealt even though they were out of their control, so they made the best of a bad situation because it was the only part of their lives that they did have control over. It reminds me of boarding school as though your stuck in a city in which you cant get out, but you have to make the best of it, just like the east Berliners did.
Wikipedia. (2007) Berlin Wall. Retrieved 12/04/07
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Berlinermauer.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Berlinwall.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Berlin_Wall_1961-11-20.jpg
Other images are courtesy of the Author
and dissimilar at the same time, for example; they had a car to, a Trabant other wise known as the Trabi; these were basically a woollen/resin chassis stuck onto a two stroke motorbike engine. Dad had a 1990 Ford Mustang red convertible. They lived on a small farm like thing, with two pigs, a goat and a horse for pulling the plough. We lived in a four storey house complete with pool table, 3 TVs, heating and a veggie patch. So you see, this little piece of wall symbolizes the gap it created through the process of being erected by the Communists and disassembled by David Hasslehoff.
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