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Stories of the Wall November 1989

The Mauerspechte: Who Actually Broke Up the Berlin Wall

The wall woodpeckers are remembered as a charming footnote. They were also the largest uncontrolled demolition in postwar Europe, and they destroyed most of the evidence.

Published 22 September 20263 min read5 sources

A man in a blue jacket and glasses holds a chisel against a heavily graffitied section of the Berlin Wall; the concrete beside him has been hacked away in large patches.
A Mauerspecht at work on the painted west face of the Wall on 1 December 1989, three weeks after the border opened. · Photograph: Aad van der Drift, CC BY 2.0 — source

They were called Mauerspechte — wall woodpeckers — and from 10 November 1989 they worked on the Berlin Wall with chisels, screwdrivers, hammers and, at the start, their hands. Many of them were Berliners who had lived beside the thing for twenty-eight years. The sound of it, thousands of small impacts at once, is the detail that everyone who was there mentions.

They are usually told as a happy footnote to 1989. They were also the reason there is so little Wall left to look at.

They went for the painted side

The woodpeckers wanted colour. A grey lump is concrete; a lump with a stripe of spray paint across it is a piece of the Berlin Wall, and that is what could be kept, shown and sold. So the painted face went first, and the painted face was the outer wall: the side that looked at West Berlin, the side the photographs were taken of, the side that carried thirty years of accumulated work by artists and passers-by.

Seen from above, a curving stretch of the Wall covered in brightly painted faces and figures, with the raked death strip, a patrol track and a second, plain wall behind it and East Berlin apartment blocks beyond.
The painted outer wall at Bethaniendamm, Kreuzberg, in 1986, photographed by Thierry Noir, who painted much of it; this pre-1989 surface is what the woodpeckers chipped away. · Photograph: Thierry Noir, CC BY-SA 3.0 — source · Painted work: Thierry Noir

That is why the best-preserved painted surfaces today are not the ones the West saw. The East Side Gallery is 1.3 kilometres of the inner wall, painted after the border opened. The pre-1989 painted surface — the one the woodpeckers were chipping at — very largely no longer exists.

Nobody resolved the argument at the time

There was a genuine conflict here, and it has not really been settled since. Historians and conservators who wanted the structure documented and preserved were arguing, in the winter of 1989, against people dismantling their own prison with hand tools. Both positions were reasonable. One of them won comprehensively.

A long wall stripped of most of its surface, with bent reinforcing bars hanging loose, while people sit and stand along it with hammers and small stalls in the evening sun.
By August 1990 whole stretches had been stripped to the reinforcing bars by hand, weeks before the contractors' heavy plant arrived. · Photograph: Smiley.toerist, CC BY-SA 4.0 — source

What stopped the woodpeckers was not preservation but scale. From the middle of 1990 the work passed to contractors with heavy plant, and from October to the Bundeswehr. Most of the Wall went into crushers and came out as aggregate for road building.

The damage is the monument

The clearest surviving evidence of what the Mauerspechte did is on Niederkirchnerstraße, where about 200 metres of the outer wall still runs past the Topography of Terror. It has deliberately not been tidied. The concrete is hollowed out in patches, the reinforcing bars are exposed, the top edge is broken away.

Illustration The painted face went first, because colour is what made a lump of concrete into a piece of the Berlin Wall. On Niederkirchnerstraße the damage has been left: hollowed concrete, exposed reinforcing bars, a broken top edge. Drawing, not to scale.
Close view of a surviving stretch of the Wall with a large hole broken through the concrete, exposed reinforcing bars crossing the gap and a fence and buildings visible through it.
The outer wall on Niederkirchnerstraße in 2019, left unrepaired: a hole hacked through by souvenir hunters, with the reinforcing bars still showing. · Photograph: Pymouss, CC BY-SA 4.0 — source

Almost every other preserved stretch has been repaired or repainted, which is defensible and which also removes the record. The Berlin heritage office describes the wall on the grounds of the Invalidenfriedhof as mutilated by souvenir hunters, and that fifteen-metre run is one of the few other places where the damage is left legible.

The market they invented

Within weeks of the border opening, fragments were being sold from tables near the Brandenburg Gate, in bags, with hand-lettered certificates. That is the origin of the entire souvenir trade in the Wall: not an official programme but thousands of people with hammers and an instinct that the pieces would be worth something.

A man stands beside a Trabant parked in front of the graffitied Wall at sunset, with fragments of concrete laid out for sale on the car's bonnet.
Fragments laid out for sale on the bonnet of a Trabant near Potsdamer Platz in January 1990. · Photograph: Rieste, CC0 — source

They were right, and the official trade caught up fast. By the spring of 1990 the East German state was selling whole elements through a foreign trade company, with printed certificates of authenticity — the same product, better packaged. Our companion article on how to tell a real piece of the Berlin Wall follows what happened to that market.

The uncomfortable conclusion

This atlas has 611 records because the Wall was broken into portable pieces and carried away. If the Mauerspechte had been stopped, and the border preserved as a monument along its length, there would be a great deal more Wall in Berlin and nothing at all to look for anywhere else.

The scattering and the destruction are the same event. You cannot have the segment in the car park in Ohio without the hole in the wall on Niederkirchnerstraße.

Every claim above carries its source.

Sources

  1. #17 Mauerspecht — Berliner ZeitungThe Mauerspechte, their tools and methods, and their place in the events of late 1989.
  2. German Mauerspechte responsible for Berlin Wall pieces in souvenir shops — GermanyinUSAThe wall woodpeckers as the origin of the fragment souvenir trade.
  3. Niederkirchnerstraße — Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Wall monumentsThe roughly 200-metre run of the Grenzmauer 75 on Niederkirchnerstraße, damaged by souvenir hunters and preserved at its original location.
  4. Rund um den Nordbahnhof — Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Wall monumentsThe fifteen metres of border wall on the Invalidenfriedhof grounds along Liesenstraße, mutilated by souvenir-seekers.
  5. Chronology — The Wall NetThe sequence of demolition from November 1989 through the contractor and Bundeswehr phases of 1990.
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These articles are written from the same catalogue the map is built on. How claims are weighed is set out in the research methodology.