A photograph wall opens where Checkpoint Charlie stood

Berlin (dpa) - Checkpoint Charlie, the former international crossing point in Berlin, now has a new tourist attraction - a huge picture gallery pin-pointing precisely where the infamous Wall once threaded its way through the heart of the city.

The point where Soviet and American tanks once squared up in angry confrontation after the barrier went up in 1961 now has another "wall" studded with photographs and information dramatically depicting the near 30-year history of the communist-built structure.

After years of squabbling, the city authorites recently gave their blessing to a 300-metre, 2.5 metre-high "Checkpoint Gallery" at the crossing point site.

The specially prepared panels have 175 photographs accompanied by commentaries, written in German and English, of some of the more dramatic moments in the wall's history.

One photograph captures the flashpoint moment when Soviet and American tanks went muzzle-to-muzzle in the tense early days after the Wall was built.

The panels are the work of the Berlin Forum for Contemporary History, and give a complete rundown of events at the Wall, illustrating in dramatic form the extent to which Berliners both east and west suffered.

Paradoxically, the gallery is located at a spot where, until a year ago, 1,065 sombre wooden crosses had been placed in memory of those killed at the inner-city border, most while trying to escape to the West.

The crosses were erected by Alexandra Hildebrandt, boss of the famous Checkpoint Charlie Museum, who felt that they should stand at the east-west city demarcation line at the former border.

But their presence angered city officials and investors who owned properties in the vicinity. They accused Hildebrandt, the Ukraine- born widow of the Museum's founder, of acting tempestuously and without official permission.

When she refused to remove them, the authorities ordered them to be demolished. In July last year, several people chained themselves to some of the crosses in protest at the police action.

Hildebrandt, angered by the Berlin government's "failure" (her words) to come up with an effective concept for dealing with a sad and brutal chapter in the city's history, felt her wooden crosses symbolised the pain and anguish caused by the wall.

For years there has been heated argument in Berlin about the way the Wall's history should best be depicted.

It was at the famous city checkpoint, in the presence of the four foreign ministers from the war-time allies, that the work of dismantling border installations began in earnest on June 22, 1990.

In the years after the Wall was demolished in 1989-90, foreign tourists often complained that there was little trace of where the city barrier - which bisected the city and also surrounded the West Berlin border - had existed.

The picture gallery panels, accesssible to the public free of charge at the Friedrich and Zimmer Strasse crossroads in Berlin Mitte, are viewed as part of the city government's overall strategy for a "permanent site of remembrance" which the authorities insist will be built in the near future

Thomas Flierl, the city's controversial left-wing PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) cultural minister, interrupted his summer holiday Friday to open the Friedrichstrasse Gallery.

Flierl, who has been heavily criticised in the past for "being soft on communism", made a point of referring to the inhuman suffering caused by the Berlin Wall.

It was on August 13, 196l that communist leader Walter Ulbricht ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall, after winning Soviet approval. At the time, hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing the state every month, fed up with life in the East.

The barrier was built of pieces of concrete prefabricated in East Gemany's state factories. Within a few years, the wall consisted of 45,000 concrete elements, 120 kilometres of barbed wire, and 300 manned watchtowers facing West Berlin.

In Bernauerstrasse, a city street cut in half by the run of the Wall in 1961 and where desperate East Berliners tried jumping to the western side from houses backing on the West, an official wall memorial site already exists, but its location is hardly favourable for visiting tourists.

The only other places where segments of the wall are to be found in their original setting are at the Niederkirchner Strasse, behind the Gropius Bau on Stresemannstrasse and at the East Side Gallery, a painted hinterland wall that runs west along the river from Oberbaum Bruecke (bridge).

Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH