Does "western freedom" in the following context mean "to free up the western Germany" or "freedom in the style of western countries"?
Which historical event is it referring to when it says "GDR citizens stood to be executed as they made their vain bids for western freedom"?
Context:
Its other flanks situate it, of course, between the post-1989 Potsdamer Platz business and shopping hub, Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Parliament: iconic landmarks of Berlin history and the evolution of German nationhood as a whole. This is the exact terrain of Cold War separation and deadlock: the former death strip (Todesstreifen), in fact, between eastern and western walls. This zone is the only possible place where the physical joins of a reunified cityscape can be located. But it is also the exact site of Germany’s one-time centre of governmental power and, therefore, inevitably ground tainted by national socialism. The memorial location itself was flanked by several ‘ministries of the Reich’, which as governmental buildings preceded the Nazis, of course, but nevertheless later came to epitomise Hitler’s rule, not least the Chancellory that was his formal headquarters. Embedding the memorial here amounts to an extraordinarily powerful, palimpsest-like rewriting of this critical urban site. It not only proposes an engagement with both Nazi and Cold War pasts but also acknowledges the legacy of the Holocaust as a phenomenon that must be allocated central importance in Berlin’s emergence as Germany’s seat of government and capital city of choice after reunification. Here is where the orders of war and mass extermination emanated from. Here is also where disillusioned GDR citizens stood to be executed as they made their vain bids for western freedom. And here is where these histories now lie entombed in Eisenman’s stelae where they are subject, though, to myriad performances of continuing human life as a multitude of bodies filter through the spaces between them.
