Suitcases. A speaker. A shopping trolley. A tiny car. Glancing through the windows of Arthouse in Temple Bar this week, you might think that these objects are installations; part of some artist's show. They are indeed part of an exhibition: they are all on loan from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin. All of these objects were used as containers to smuggle people across the border from East to West when the Berlin Wall was still in existence.
In 1977, a young woman named Renate Hagen folded herself like a contortionist inside the square speaker cabinet. It was part of the equipment which belonged to Theo Klerk, a Dutch singer who had been performing in East Berlin. He took her out with him, and to complete the magic, they later married. A small boy was taken out in the zip-up shopping trolley, of the kind you avoid on footpaths for fear of having your ankles maimed by over-enthusiastic shoppers.
A woman escaped on a cross-border train with the help of her French fiance. Like the illusionist in the circus who saws the lady in half, he performed the magical trick of hiding her in two suitcases, which he had cut open and placed next to each other on the luggage rack. The air induction system of the little red and white Isetta car was removed, along with the heating system, leaving a tiny space for a body to squash itself down into. Six people escaped at different times in this particular car.
All of the objects currently on show in Arthouse are part of a multi-media exhibition to tie in with a new play by Renate Ahrens-Kramer, When The Wall Came Down. The multi-media show, entitled Checkpoint Charlie Exhibition, opened this week and will run until February 7th. The play, which will be performed in Arthouse's basement studio, opens on Thursday, January 22nd.
Bairbe Ni Chaoimh is directing the play for Storytellers Theatre Company. She went to Berlin last summer with Ahrens-Kramer to look at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. When they were there, the idea began to form of producing When The Wall Came Down in Dublin alongside a multi-media exhibition, which would place the play in its historical and social context.
To reach the stairs which lead down to the studio, the audience must first walk through this exhibition. The resulting effect is fascinating: rather like looking at a three-dimensional programme.
As well as the objects in which people were smuggled out, the Checkpoint Charlie Exhibition at Arthouse includes other elements. There are several black and white photographic prints of the Berlin Wall, which track its history and eventual destruction. There are also videos which record the aural histories of German escapees now living in Ireland, as well as footage of the Wall and surrounding area. In addition, Arthouse has put some pages on its website with background information on the play and the Berlin Wall, as well as a graphic of the video which is used within the performance. Their address is: http.//www.arthouse.ie.
Among the prints displayed in the exhibition are images of the Berlin Wall being built: large clumsy concrete blocks being placed directly on top of each other, looking like a sinister version of a child's first experiment with Lego. The Wall was 155 kilometres long in total, punctuated by 302 watch towers. There were 5,075 successful escapes across the Wall over the years. 239 people died while trying to escape.
When the Wall came down in November 1989, there was a brisk world-wide trade in the concept of Buy-Your-Own-Bit-Of-Berlin-Wall. In London, where I was living at the time, Camden Market hosted a succession of souvenir stalls selling Berlin Wall earrings, paperweights, pendants, and crudely fashioned bracelets. Stall-holders produced passports and photographs of themselves hacking away at bits of the Wall to prove their authenticity.
It was history transformed into irresistible kitsch. Somewhere in my attic there is a box which contains a tiny piece of the Berlin Wall: perhaps the most fragmented structure of the 20th century.
Museums across the world now display large parts of the Wall; on some parts of the famous Berlin Wall subculture of graffiti can be seen.
Unsurprisingly, the ugly and detested symbol of repression of freedom was soon destroyed. Within weeks, much of the Berlin Wall had disappeared completely. Berlin today is a city of ghostly boundaries, through which you walk unwittingly, several times a day. Tourists still arrive with their cameras at the Brandenburg Gate, and look around in bewilderment for a Wall which can no longer be seen. There are plans to run a copper line through the city, to show where it used to be.
In May 1990, seven months after the Wall came down, Renate Ahrens-Kramer a newspaper story about an archival clerk in East Berlin. The clerk had uncovered documents which recorded the forced adoption of children of parents who were caught trying to escape from East Germany. It inspired her to start the research for what was to become When The Wall Came Down.
Ahrens-Kramer (42) was born in Herford, in northern Westphalia. When her husband, a history lecturer, was offered a job in Trinity, they moved to Ireland in 1986. Ahrens-Kramer had been teaching French and English in Germany and had "become tired of it". The move to Ireland coincided with her desire to focus more on her own writing.
For a time, she worked as a translator, and also had some short stories broadcast on German radio. In 1991, RTE Radio 1 broadcast her play Back To Berlin. Then, in one of those surreal (and lucrative) diversions that sometimes come writers' ways, she was offered the opportunity to join a script-writing team for the German version of Sesame Street. "There are cultural adaptations made to the show across the world," she says. Fascinating adaptations they are too. What is it about Big Bird, for instance, that makes him unacceptable to German children? Instead of yellow-feathered Big Bird, they have the character of Big Bear.
Consequently, since 1991, Ahrens-Kramer has been commuting between Dublin and Hamburg on a regular basis. When The Wall Came Down is her first stage play. There are four cast members: Ruth McCabe, Johnny Murphy, Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, and Iseult Golden.
The first draft was written some years ago, in German. "It was too long and too complicated. I rewrote it in English and left out some characters; tightened it up all round."
The play is set in a small East German town near the Czech border in 1974 and 1991. In the 1974 scenes, a married couple with a one-year-old daughter attempt to escape into Czechoslovakia. They are caught, arrested, and their daughter is taken away for adoption by another East German family. As the play unfolds, the consequences of that failed bid for freedom as a family are revealed. "It's not based on one particular story, but it is representative of many people's stories," Ahrens-Kramer says with conviction.
Storytellers Theatre Company presents When The Wall Came Down by Renate Ahrens-Kramer from next Thursday at Arthouse in Dublin's Temple Bar (8 p.m.) Checkpoint Charlie Exhibition, also at Arthouse, runs until February 7th.