Qualla: Bernauer Straße

Bernauer Straße: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit unbekannt (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), Public domain. On the morning of 22 August 1961, Ida Siekmann threw her bedding and a few belongings out of a third-floor window onto a Berlin pavement, and then she jumped after them. She was 58, a nurse, one day short of her fifty-ninth birthday. The building she lived in stood in the Soviet sector; the pavement below it lay in the French sector of West Berlin. The evening before, East German workers had started sealing the doors and windows of her block. She was badly injured on landing and died on the way to the Lazarus Hospital a few streets away — the first person killed by the Berlin Wall, nine days after construction began. The address was Bernauer Straße 48.

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Image: unbekannt (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) | Public domain

Bernauer Straße: A Line Drawn in 1920

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. The street is old. It ran northeast out of the city as a commercial and military road toward the Margraviate of Brandenburg, and it took its present name on 29 May 1862, having previously been known only as Straße 50 and then Straße 80. What made it lethal was paperwork. When Gre...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Bernauer Straße: The Windows

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit OTFW, Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0. That is why Bernauer Straße became famous. People stepped out of their own windows and landed in the West. Some were caught in nets held by West Berlin firefighters below; some, like Ida Siekmann, were not. On 15 August 1961, two days after the border was closed, a 19-year-old Ea...

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Image: OTFW, Berlin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bernauer Straße: Under the Street

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Realpaperforest, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the surface closed, the escapes went underground. The Bernauer Straße U-Bahn station sat inside East Berlin with one entrance opening onto the Western pavement, so the entrance was bricked into the Wall and the station became a ghost stop that trains rolled through without s...

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Image: Realpaperforest | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bernauer Straße: Eight in the Morning, 11 November

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karl-Ludwig Lange, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Wall was first breached on the evening of 9 November 1989. The following day, crews began cutting an opening where it crossed between Bernauer Straße and nearby Eberswalder Straße, working through the night while crowds pressed in on both sides to watch. The crossing opened a...

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Image: Karl-Ludwig Lange | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bernauer Straße: What They Left Standing

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0. Bernauer Straße kept one of the longest surviving sections of the Wall, and in 1999 part of it became the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer — a memorial that reconstructs the border fortifications as they actually were, including the raked sand of the death strip that the tourist imagi...

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Image: Sarah Stierch | CC BY 4.0