From Confrontation to Détente? Controversies about a planned Cold War Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin

Join us for a talk by Dr. Andreas Etges (University of Munich), " From Confrontation to Détente? Controversies about a planned Cold War Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin".

Free and open to the public.

Berlin was a center of the Cold War, and several museums, sites, and memorials focus on some aspects of the German division or on the Cold War. A new museum telling the international history of the Cold War right at former allied Checkpoint Charlie – the site of a dangerous tank confrontation between American and Soviet forces in 1961 – has become the subject of controversies between private and public museums, political parties, the state government and the federal government, representatives of the victims of communism and academic historians from Germany and beyond, as well as by those who worry about gentrification and the city selling out its prime spaces to major real estate investors. With Berlin now once again owning the site, an urban planning commission and one dealing with Checkpoint Charlie as a site for education and memory have been set up.

Andreas Etges has been involved in these debates for many years and is the president of an association that has been lobbying for the new museum, which was first proposed by the government of Berlin in 2006.