Modern forms of remembrance
A successful cooperation between the German Embassy and the Diefenbunker Museum.
“We could not have imagined a better place in Canada for remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall and German Unity” – Martin Schurig, Head of Culture and Communications at the German Embassy, is more than happy about the cooperation with the Diefenbunker Museum in Ottawa. From November 2014 to May 2015 “Canada’s Cold War Museum” joined forces with the embassy to present three different formats – a cooperation which garnered a nomination for the Ottawa Tourism Award. The exhibition “Dictatorship and Democracy in the Age of Extremes” gathered together some 200 rare photographs, newspaper cuttings and political caricatures from European archives. The Diefenbunker Museum simultaneously showed graffiti work by German and Canadian artists which looked at the Berlin Wall at a festival in February 2014 (photo). And, with her installation “The Wall, Niederkirchner Strasse”, photographer Leslie Hossack conveyed a particularly up-to-date impression of the Wall.
Martin Schurig also offered a reminder that Ottawa has a particular historical link with German Unity, as well; on February 13, 1990, the foreign ministers of the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries reached an agreement there about the Two Plus One framework for the negotiations West and East Germany then embarked on with the United States, the Soviet Union, the UK and France – “This means that Ottawa played a crucial role in the Two Plus One Treaty which was so fundamental to German Unity.”
