Rainer Just, a native of West Berlin, had been working at the Versöhnungsgemeinde (Reconciliation Church) on Bernauer Straße in West Berlin since 1980. His workplace was directly on the Wall: the Documentation Center of the Berlin Wall Memorial was housed in the church building, which had been opened in 1965. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rainer Just also advocated for the preservation of the Wall as a monument.
After 1990, the euphoria over the fall of the Wall was largely over. However, people were still picking at the Wall, to an extent that is completely unimaginable today. Poor Manfred Fischer lived here and had to sleep with this. He regularly turned up on the street below in his bathrobe and asked people: ‘Don't do that over here, you can peck up there and down there.’
We realized that we could not handle it; they would chop it up so much that there would not be anything left. At this point [Helmut] Trotnow intervened and used his budget to fence in the whole area from Bergstrasse up to Ackerstrasse, the Sophien Parish site, the cemetery.
There were even two security guards there for a long time, who kept watch over it at night. They did a lot to prevent the Wall from becoming even more demolished than it already was. Without that, it would probably all have been destroyed until June ‘90, when the official demolition of the Wall began and this was the last part of the Wall where Berlin visitors could go to “gnaw off” something. [Trotnow] had fenced it in. As a result, we were spared the most serious consequences from June ‘90 onwards.
Rainer Just, excerpt from the oral history interview on June 11, 2021, Interviewer: Sarah Bornhorst
The division of the city should be overcome, and the Berlin Wall should disappear as quickly as possible. In Bernauer Strasse, however, a group led by Manfred Fischer, pastor of the Reconciliation Church, advocates for preserving a piece of the border installations as a memorial. It is meant to serve as a future reminder of the Wall and the consequences of this border for the people and the city.
In the summer of 1990, shortly before the 29th anniversary of the Wall's construction, the initiators place a sign at the site on Bernauer Straße with the following inscription:
“Attention! Attention!
Dear "Mauerspechte" (Wallpeckers), please do not ‘knock’ on this piece of the Wall. ... Please help preserve an authentic and dignified memorial, especially for the victims of this border.”