A 1950s residential building with playground used as a temporary home for refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries on the site of the former emergency reception camp for refugees and resettlers from the GDR in Berlin-Marienfelde. -AFP

East Germans fleeing communism were once housed there. Today, a center in the German capital offers refuge to people who have fled war and poverty from Afghanistan to Africa.

At the entrance to the residential center, a section of the Berlin Wall that fell 35 years ago still stands today as a silent memory of the Cold War.

At the time, many of those who had fled Soviet-occupied postwar eastern Germany were housed within a dozen blocks of central Berlin, in the charmless suburb of Marienfelde.

Until 1989, when the German Democratic Republic collapsed, more than 1.3 million people passed through the “emergency camp” in what was then West Berlin, before most of them died. found new accommodation in what was then West Germany.

Today, Arab, Afghan and African voices can be heard in the tree-lined courtyard of the facility that opened in 1953 and still houses some 700 people at a time.

New arrivals always walk through the entrance hall “with all their suitcases and everything they can take with them,” explained the center’s director, Olivija Music.

One of them is Layan Al-Jazzar, a 22-year-old Syrian who arrived from Jordan last winter with her sister Lara, 26, and their mother Amina, 57, and who now shares with them a modest two pieces.

When the three women first arrived, she said, “we cried together all the time because we didn’t speak the language and didn’t know anyone here.”

Even today, says Jazzar, she only leaves the center to take her German lessons, explaining that in this unknown city, “I’m afraid to go alone, that’s why I stay all the time. time sitting at home.

The history of the center of Marienfelde is no longer “linked only to the German-German migration, but also to a very diverse migration”, explains Bettina Effner, who runs a small museum adjacent to the site.

After German reunification in 1990, the facility housed many ethnic Germans who came from Eastern Europe during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As this influx waned, the site was eventually closed for a few months in 2010, but was later reopened to refugees from war-torn Iraq.

In the museum, videos retrace the journeys of refugees from Syria or Afghanistan and new arrivals also discover the history of the German refugees who preceded them.

Immigration has become a hot topic in Germany and beyond, leading to the rise of far-right parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The AfD has made solid progress, notably in East Germany, in the decade since the influx of more than a million asylum seekers from Syria and other conflict zones .

The museum can’t take “political positions,” Effner said, but she said it aims to explore questions about “what it means for people to leave… what kind of society they’re entering into and what kind of society they want. “