This is a broad-ranging, deeply researched study of memory culture and the Berlin Wall. Examining debates at both the municipal and the federal level, Hope Harrison draws on more than one hundred interviews and emails, files in eleven archives, several dozen newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, and cultural artifacts including films, plays, and novels. Harrison's significant achievements include vivid analysis of memory activists and their initiatives, careful attention to diverse and competing narratives, and thoughtful interrogation of how Germany's memory politics regarding the Nazi era shaped memory politics involving the Berlin Wall.

Harrison introduces readers to memory activist Manfred Fischer, pastor of the Church of Reconciliation on Bernauer Strasse, which had been encircled by the Berlin Wall and then destroyed by the East German government in 1985. Fischer worked tirelessly, together with Helmut Trotnow of the German Historical Museum, to preserve the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse as the core of a memorial. Harrison analyzes this complex and contested process, featuring neighborhood opponents such as the pastor of Sophien Church, also in the former German Democratic Republic, who wanted unencumbered access to the parish cemetery that had been cut off by the Berlin Wall. Harrison writes, “Citizens’ initiatives … and local, state, and national officials weighed in on both sides. No approach would satisfy everyone” (88). Ultimately, Fischer prevailed, after arguing for the global as well as local and national significance of the Berlin Wall, and a memorial including the former Berlin Wall was dedicated on August 13, 1998, later enhanced by a visitor center, documentary exhibition, additional memorials, and a substantial expansion.

Readers also learn about memory activist Alexandra Hildebrandt, director of a private museum at Checkpoint Charlie, who erected 1,065 wooden crosses at the famous border crossing on October 31, 2004, each one representing an individual who had died at the Berlin Wall and at the whole German-German border. Hildebrandt's high-profile initiative pushed Berlin's city government to develop a master plan for remembering the Berlin Wall (Gesamtplan). The master plan, completed in 2006, “institutionalized and expanded existing historical sites and commemorative rituals connected with the Wall” (223), incorporating sites such as the Berlin Wall Memorial Site at Bernauer Strasse, the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, Potsdamer Platz, the Berlin Wall History Mile, and the Berlin Wall Bike Trail.

A focus on the former border guards (Grenzer) allows Harrison to analyze competing narratives and interpretations of the German Democratic Republic. The late December 1991 trial of Uwe Hapke and Udo Walther, who killed Michael Schmidt while he attempted to sneak across to the West in 1984, elicited public discussion not only of their individual guilt, but also of the formal structure of East Germany's border system and the officials who gave orders and ran the regime. Ultimately, jurors found Hapke and Walther guilty, yet in the February 1992 sentencing, the judge, noting the role of indoctrination as well as the low rank of the former guards, suspended their sentences. Harrison also explores an extended debate over whether the eight border guards shot in the line of duty at the border should be included in a memorial at Bernauer Strasse to individuals killed at the Berlin Wall. Ultimately, planners decided to include the border guards near, but not as part of, the primary memorial, thereby acknowledging their deaths as part of the history of the Berlin Wall, but separate from those who died trying to leave. By 2014, a new permanent exhibit at the documentation center of the Berlin Wall Memorial, “To Shoot or Not to Shoot,” invited visitors to probe the complex experiences of the Grenzer.

Harrison skillfully situates memory work surrounding the Berlin Wall within public engagement with the legacies of the Nazi era. How should Germans acknowledge citizen suffering under communism, without minimizing German responsibility for Nazi crimes, the central focus of West German memory culture? Harrison closely analyzes the development of the federal government's memorial plan (Gedenkstättenkonzeption). Finalized in 2008, the plan emphasized that the Nazi period carried “singular significance in German, European and worldwide memory culture” (238), but also addressed Social Unity Party of German's injustice in four areas: division and the border, surveillance and persecution, society and everyday life, and resistance and opposition.

Harrison also explores how, in contrast to sites associated with Nazi history, the Berlin Wall evoked not only trauma but also joy, associated with its peaceful and unexpected opening in November 1989. At the official celebrations for the twentieth anniversary in 2009 and the twenty-fith anniversary in 2014, German political leaders presented a “positive founding myth, that of the Peaceful Revolution” (388). As Harrison writes, “The new narrative of 2009 emphasized that Germany was not just a nation of Nazi and then communist perpetrators and victims; it was also a nation of heroes who demanded freedom and democracy and peacefully brought down the Berlin Wall” (393). Yet, by the time of the thirtieth anniversary in 2019, this joyful narrative no longer fit a Germany beset by the refugee crisis, persistent feelings of disappointment among former East Germans, and the rise of the Alternative for Germany Party. The 2019 celebrations thus emphasized Germans’ broad and differentiated “hopes, desires, and demands” through more than one hundred events, exhibits, art installations, seminars, and other gatherings (412). Harrison concludes that interpretations of the wall's place in Berlin's and Germany's history will “continue to evolve as contemporary circumstances change and result in different kinds of questions being asked about the past” (422).

After the Berlin Wall is an excellent monograph that will stand for many years as a necessary reference point for historians researching post-reunification Berlin. This thoroughly researched and well-written book will appeal to scholars of contemporary German history, public history, and the history of memory and commemoration.