This chapter is devoted to an exposition of the way in which the Christian Democratic ideology has historically conceived – and proposed to structure – the relationship between politics and religion. The analysis will proceed through a reconstruction of the meaning assigned to the concept of religious ‘inspiration’ of politics in this intellectual and political tradition.

This chapter explores the basic metaphysical premises on which the Christian Democratic ideology is based, focusing in particular on its conception of human nature. It does so through an engagement with the meaning this ideological tradition has historically assigned to the concept of the human “person.”

While the conflicts with the Sophien parish played out over creating a Berlin Wall Memorial, and a whole site for remembering the Berlin Wall in the former death strip, Manfred Fischer oversaw activities in his own parish to remember the Wall and its victims.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, people around the world still remember the joyous drama of that night and the days and nights that followed. Even at a time before smartphones and Twitter helped people experience an event together, the surprise opening of the Berlin Wall was viewed by millions on television sets and splashed across headlines around the globe. For Berliners and Germans, dramatic days followed that would change their lives and their country.

With the toppling of the Berlin Wall and soon thereafter the East German SED regime, Horst Schmidt wanted to make sure “the murderers” at the Wall would pay for what they had done. His twenty-year-old son Michael had been killed on December 1, 1984 while trying to escape across the Berlin Wall. When the Wall fell, Horst and his wife Dorothea “could not feel anything of the excitement…they would have felt without Michael’s tragic death.

Just as there is a spectrum of views on the role of border soldiers in the system surrounding the Berlin Wall, so Germans have differing perspectives on the attitudes and policies of both East and West Germans regarding the Wall when it stood, on the reasons for its fall, and its legacy.

For many years after the fall of the Wall, a small minority of memory activists worked to counter the majority impulse to remove the Wall from the landscape and from memory. The combination of the physical dismantling of the Wall, the joyous performances of Beethoven, and the trials connected to deaths at the Wall were all meant to draw that period of German history to a close and allow people to move on, even as others were focused on the deeper, more problematic past connected to the Holocaust.

On October 31, 2004, two weeks in advance of the fifteenth anniversary of the toppling of the Wall, the director of the private Checkpoint Charlie Wall Museum, Alexandra Hildebrandt, unveiled 1,065 wooden crosses in memory of the people killed at the Berlin Wall and along the entire former East German border.

After years of putting the memory of the Wall aside, followed by a period of focusing on the victims of the Wall and finally on proud celebration of the brave and peaceful East German people who pushed open the Wall, the official narrative as well as its contemporary relevance changed again in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis in Germany and the resulting rise of right-wing, sometimes violent, extremism in Germany.

Since the fall of the Wall, memory activists had long centered the memory of the Wall on victims, particularly those killed trying to escape. Manfred Fischer’s efforts to preserve the Wall as a “crime scene,” the erection of the Kohlhoff & Kohlhoff memorial at Bernauer Strasse, Alexandra Hildebrandt’s cemetery of crosses at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin’s master plan (Gesamtkonzept) for remembering the Wall, and the federal government’s plan for memorials (Gedenkstättenkonzeption) were all illustrative of this focus. This would remain the case with the expansion of the Berlin Wall Memorial Site at Bernauer Strasse. Simultaneously, however, a contentious process of examining and remembering the perpetrators also took place, yet this time outside of the courtroom.

Until 2009, the main focus of public discussions and commemoration of the Berlin Wall in Germany had been on the victims and particularly those who had been killed at the Wall by East German border soldiers. The Wall represented “a difficult past” that people either shied away from or addressed by commemorating the victims.

While the Berlin government was making major strides in the mid-2000s in remembering the Wall and commemorating its victims with the Gesamtkonzept, several memory wars played out in the process of institutionalizing federal policy regarding the Berlin Wall.