Location: at the entrance to the Harmony German Club
1 segment from Potsdamer Platz
Two restaurants, bistro, catering, choir and dance parties – the Harmony German Club on the Southern outskirts of Canberra is dedicated since 1963 to protect and care German culture Down Under. Since October 1992, the driveway is adorned by a segment of the Berlin Wall.
How the segment came there, is unknown to today’s club president Hans Stoehr. The original protagonists are deceased. It is simply narrated, that the segment was on a Russian cargo ship to Australia, stood for a while in the docks of Botany Bay, to be finally placed on the club grounds.
Photo above and background:
© by ArchivesACT. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
There is another segment in Australia. It was imported by a German born business man and displayed at a packaging exhibition (AusPlas??) in Sydney sometime in 1990-91. The company he and I both worked for was taken over and I lost contact with him. I believe he was to install it in his house in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. I do have photos of the uncrating of the segment at our workshop and have some smaller chips. Would be interested to see what happened to it
Hi Leann.
Thank you very much. We are going to find out more. What we have up to now: The exhibition is called Auspack and is a biennial, so it must have been in 1991. We will try to get more information. In the meantime: We would be very grateful if you could upload your photos and give us the name of the German born business man. Please use ‘Upload’ in the navigation for photos and e-mail (info@the-wall-net.org) for other information.
Hi,
The section of the Wall at the Harmonie German Club was purchased by the Club Committee in 1992 on the advice of the then President, Guenter Koerner. Guenter was the Club’s longest-serving President and sadly died in 2018.
He gave a good description to Anna Kaminsky in 2014 of how the section arrived in Australia:
“We were eventually able to get hold of a section of the Wall for 500 Deutsch Marks with help from friends in Berlin (Feely and Kilian Heerwig). The section of Wall arrived in Sydney a few months later on board a Russian container ship, packed in a container. In the meantime, a site had been created within the grounds of the clubhouse which was surrounded by a wall made from natural stone. The official unveiling took place on 3 October 1992, the two-year anniversary of German unification. The memorial was opened by Dr Otto Roever from Canberra’s German embassy, our mixed choir gave a musical accompaniment, and hundreds of guests were in attendance. The section of Wall has become one of Canberra’s most popular tourist attractions. Even Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin, has been to visit our memorial to German unification.”
Thanks to Anna Kaminsky, Where in the World is the Berlin Wall”. available on Google Books
I’m the current Secretary of the Harmonie German Club.
Thank you, Maria, for your comment 🙂
Hello
The piece I mentioned in 2017 has been found in a warehouse in Blacktown, Sydney. Refer https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/lost-piece-of-berlin-wall-found-in-western-sydney-warehouse-20191108-p538sg.html.
Very cool. Thanks for the link!