Walled in!, 2009

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of Germany’s inner border, Deutsche Welle collaborated with ART+COM on creating a short documentary visualising the wall. ART+COM made a ten-minute HD-animation to make understand the wall’s impact and lethal construction. The documentary was broadcast worldwide by DW-TV in German, English, Arabic and Spanish under the title “Walled in! Germany’s inner border”. Moreover, it is shown at the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße in Berlin to allow visitors — especially younger ones who haven’t lived with it — to experience the wall virtually. The movie has also been used in German school education.

The movie starts with a patrol ride in a typical Eastern military vehicle along the Berlin wall, then shows the defence system in detail and finally guides the viewer to the border area in Hötensleben, Saxony-Anhalt. With the help of historians, the border installations were recreated, and give a vivid impression of how West and East Germany were separated in the 1980s. Mats with spiky nails, alarm wires, and spring guns — the animation illustrates different devices used to prevent people from escaping the East. A realistic picture is also drawn of the no-man’s-land, an area that was never accessible to the public.