But the act which was supposed to erase this image from consciousness produced another image in the consciousness of the international public. The demolition of the church revealed the character of that system even more clearly than the strangulation of the church building through wall and barbed wire had. Instead of being over quickly, of having the horror replaced by peace at the end, the film of the fall is "showed' over and over again, up to the present day. The removal of traces itself leaves behind traces, and these traces are sometimes marked even more clearly in our memory than the original ones were.

But the image of the falling church should not be the final image of the Reconciliation Parish. After the fall of the Wall, the Reconciliation Parish immediately began to look into its own history and tradition. The retracing of the Wall was impeded by the fact that with the Wall, the Parish had been limited to West Berlin, while the Parish archive remained in East Berlin, its contents scattered over the years in different places. When this history was finally reconstructed, it became clear that the fate of the Parish itself reflected that of Germany as a whole:

The Evangelical Reconciliation Parish was established in 1894. At this time, Berlin was the largest industrial center in Europe. Wihelmian Germany flourished in style here. Thousands of people streamed to the new capital city. They sought work, needed a new home. Poverty was widespread. The mission of the newly established parish was a reconciliation of social tensions. The two World Wars had serious consequences for Germany as well as for the church community.