For many years after the fall of the Wall, a small minority of memory activists worked to counter the majority impulse to remove the Wall from the landscape and from memory. The combination of the physical dismantling of the Wall, the joyous performances of Beethoven, and the trials connected to deaths at the Wall were all meant to draw that period of German history to a close and allow people to move on, even as others were focused on the deeper, more problematic past connected to the Holocaust.