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this place is not only a museum
telling the history of
divided germany and flight in divided germany but it´s still a living place
since 2010 Marienfelde serves as temporary housing for
refugees from all over the world.
Here on this map, ehm
you can see
the Marienfelde refugee center in the southwest of
Berlin up to the year of ninety sixty one.
There were so many people coming here that Marienfelde was overcrowded
and there was not enough room
at all for these people.
So you had up to
at times eighty more
refugee camps
in West-Berlin. Something that was very important for
the atmosphere here was the presence of the GDR secret service
the Stasi.
You had signs warning the refugees not to talk openly
to others
not to tell their names
and, yeah,
to be careful. So you see
apart from all those
personal stories, biographies connected to this place,
it's also a,
ehm,
a place where you could observe very well the conflicts of the cold war,
because everybody involved was here.
Here you can see
a refugee-apartment
with
furniture from the nineteen fifties.
So this is the way it looked
in the fifties and of course you have to imagine
many,many people in one room.
In 1989
ehm
they had a situation that compares to the year of 1953:
the place was overcrowded and again
there were tents outside, the offices had to move out and there were mass accomodations
in West Berlin, because Marienfelde couldn´t
take everybody in.
So there is
the reasons
for leaving but there's also the question:
How
the West recieved
the refugees,
what opportunities they had in the West,
but also what problems
in the "Golden West"