The record
Two Potsdamer Platz segments, a length of inner-German fence and several artists' pieces, at the memorial to a massacre the Cold War produced on a Korean island.
On the morning of 3 April 1948 farmers and fishermen on the island of Jeju rose against the police stations and government offices of the central authority in Seoul, and for a short time held the island. The retaliation by the South Korean security services and army was without mercy: more than half of all settlements were burned, their people abducted or shot, and between twenty-five and thirty thousand islanders were killed over the following months while the American occupation forces looked on. When North Korea invaded in 1950, supposed insurgents were arrested and shot again. Fifty years of silence followed. The taboo was broken only in 1992, when some of the dead were allowed to be taken out of mass graves and buried.
The memorial park that now records this holds two segments of the Berlin Wall, given by the City of Berlin in 2007. Youngmin Kwon, a former ambassador to Berlin and chancellor of the Jeju Peace Institute, worked with the island administration to obtain them. The institute's director of planning, Jae-hawn Kim, explained the reasoning: the Berlin Wall and the Jeju uprising were both products of the confrontation between the blocs, and both were in the end overcome peacefully, which made the island a fitting place for them. The two elements stood on the Sony site at Potsdamer Platz until they were handed to the Berlin Senate in 2005, and carry a plaque recording them as Sony's gift to the capital.
They are not the only border on the site. The Grenzlandmuseum in the Thuringian Eichsfeld contributed a piece of the inner-German frontier — about two metres of the expanded metal fencing used along the barriers facing the Federal Republic — which has stood in the park since 2007.
Two years before that, the French gallerist Sylvestre Verger brought his wall exhibition to Jeju-si under the title From the DMZ to the Berlin Wall, showing work by international artists who had painted parts of the Wall. Korean artists were given concrete blocks for the occasion and their pieces are still on the island: Jung Hyun Kim hung a complete element of the Hinterlandmauer in a frame and lettered it DMZ; Suk Won Park joined a black element to a white one with the word one; and Sung Mook Choi marked a last piece with a left-facing swastika, which in Korea is a symbol of love.
The listing came without coordinates; the pin is the memorial park's own, and where in the park the segments stand is not stated.
How did it get here?
Two segments from the Sony site at Potsdamer Platz, handed to the Berlin Senate in 2005 and given to Jeju by the City of Berlin in 2007 at the instance of Youngmin Kwon and the island administration.
Sources
Listed by the Federal Foundation as #257 and by the Berlin Wall Archive as #191.
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide, site entry ↗
The 1948 Jeju uprising and its suppression with twenty-five to thirty thousand dead, the fifty-year silence and the 1992 exhumations, the two Berlin Wall segments given by the City of Berlin in 2007 through Youngmin Kwon and the island administration, Jae-hawn Kim's reasoning, their Potsdamer Platz and Sony provenance and the 2005 transfer to the Berlin Senate, the inner-German fence section contributed by the Grenzlandmuseum Eichsfeld in 2007, and the 2005 Sylvestre Verger exhibition and the works left by Jung Hyun Kim, Suk Won Park and Sung Mook Choi.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17
제주 4·3평화공원 — 상징조형물 (Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation) ↗
The Jeju 4·3 Peace Foundation's page on the park's symbolic structures: Berlin donated part of the Wall in 2007 to mark the creation of the park, and the page ties the division it stands for to the history of the 1948 uprising.
Institutional sourceSource accessed 2026-09-17
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 257
Berlin Wall Archive ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 191
Source-reported segments: 2. This is not a separately verified count.
No photograph of this one has been published. If you have taken one, or know when it arrived or who gave it, we would like to hear. Contribute to this record