“The Woman Who Fell In Love With the Berlin Wall”:
When I was a child, I thought all people looked at objects the way I did,” she says. “I was 14 or 15 when I discovered most people are heterosexual. But I’d always been attracted to objects, even before puberty. My father built various models, including a model of the Great Wall of China. Then, when I was seven years old, I saw the Berlin Wall on television, just as it was completed. It was my first love. My feelings were like, ‘Wow, it’s gorgeous.’”
The love was sealed by marriage in the summer of 1979, in a ceremony attended only by a penpal. Wall Winther subsequently took her husband’s name, to be known as Wall Winther Berliner Mauer (Berliner Mauer is ‘Berlin Wall’ in German). Of course, this wasn’t technically legal matrimony, but Wall Winther shrugs this off, insisting the spiritual bond is what counts.
“I don’t think that’s important,” she says. “If I want to marry the Berlin Wall and have a normal ceremony and do other normal things that are done at a wedding, then I’m married.”
