Category Archives: Berlin

Navigating Germany and the UK in a wheelchair

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Christiane Link has written about disability law in the UK and Germany for many years. She is disappointed nowadays when she finds thoughtless provision in what used to be her home country. This is from her newsletter, The Reverse Culture Shock is real – my Berlin experience

Here is what people often miss: Germany does not have anything equivalent to the UK Equality Act 2010. The Behindertengleichstellungsgesetz and even the Anti-Discrimination Act, the main disability equality laws, apply either primarily to federal public bodies or are a paper tiger. Enforcement remains weak and difficult for individual disabled people in a service environment outside employment. It is nothing compared to the UK law. There is no meaningful compensation mechanism for disabled people who face barriers. It’s all very bureaucratic, and organisations rarely get a slap on the wrist. And they know that. You can complain, and you can be ignored or get a very German letter back, and that is largely the end of it. Often, you feel more offended than you were before.

East Side Gallery cleanup

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The last time graffiti were removed from the East Side Gallery (in 2009), they put a film over it so the next time it would be easier to remove. I suppose it will no longer read Middlesbrough F.C. – Save Our Steel. These were taken on October 26 2015.

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You can see a picture of the current clean-up on the Guardian site. It shows a cleaner version of the Trabi picture than mine, with the temporary fence in front, here being looked at by two very elegant Chinese persons who I failed to photograph from the front:

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“It is a sisyphean task to keep it clean,” said Adalbert Maria Klees, the district’s chief technician, whose job it is to remove the graffiti. Standing in front of one of the most famous murals – Birgit Kinder’s painting of an East German Trabant car appearing to burst through the wall – as it is rubbed in a pungent brown graffiti remover by a worker, he said: “This looked even worse this morning. Full of ‘I love yous’ and ‘I was heres’ in every language under the sun.”
The Trabant and around a quarter of the other murals have already been placed behind a temporary metal fence …
Klees admitted the unease he and others feel about erecting another barrier in front of a barrier that was designed to prevent East Germans from escaping the GDR. “It is absurd to be protecting the Berlin Wall, of all things, with a fence,” he said.

Flood of faces of people coming through the wall – the artist said he was there at the time and noticed the people did not look happy:

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Mauerspringer (Wall Jumper).

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The Berliner Morgenpost reports today that from now on there will be a fence keeping people 1.3 m away from the wall, with signs in various languages explaining the need to protect the works of art:

Berlin. Vor den Resten der Berliner Mauer wird eine 80 bis 90 Zentimeter hohe Absperrung errichtet. Das Geländer solle Menschen davon abhalten, die East Side Gallery zu beschmieren, sagte Bezirksamtssprecher Sascha Langenbach am Donnerstag. Hinweisschilder in verschiedenen Sprachen sollen demnach zusätzlich darüber aufklären, dass die Kunstwerke darauf schützenswert seien. Berliner und Touristen sollen laut dem Sprecher künftig einen “Respektabstand” von 1,30 Meter zur Mauer halten.