The Berlin Wall: A scattered symbol

Sign advertises pieces of the Wall for sale

By Paul Sussman
CNN.com writer

(CNN) -- In the decade since it was torn down, the Berlin Wall -- one of the 20th century's pre-eminent symbols of division -- has itself been divided and scattered across the globe.

There is now a piece on the harbour-front in Cape Town, South Africa, another at a German community centre in Canberra, Australia, another outside U.S. CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and another in the car park of the National Army Museum in London, England.

Ronald Reagan has a chunk, as do George Bush and Pope John Paul II. A segment in Moscow carries the graffiti "BER." The "LIN" is on a separate segment in Riga, Latvia.

There's even a slab sitting in the middle of the no-man's land separating North and South Korea.

"It was like it just blew up," says Berliner Matthias Gross, 46, who was there on November 9, 1989, the night the Wall came down. "One moment there was this huge barrier through the centre of our city, the next there were bits of it spreading all over the world, like a volcano had erupted."

Souvenirs

People eagerly wait to buy Wall souvenirs

"There's hardly anything of it left," says Helmut Trotnow, director of Berlin's Allied Museum. "Between November 1989 and November 1990 there was a sort of anarchy. The Wall and everything to do with it was torn down and removed, partly in protest at what it stood for, partly by people who wanted a souvenir, and partly because it just got in the way of rebuilding work."

Vestiges of the Wall can still be seen in Potsdamer Platz, Bernauerstrasse and close to the site of the former Checkpoint Charlie crossing point between East and West Berlin.

The longest remaining section is the so-called East Side Gallery, a 1.3-km (0.8-mile) stretch along the banks of the River Spree decorated with images by artists from all over the world.

"The idea originated in 1990," explains gallery director Kani Alavi. "A group of 20 artists thought it would be good to paint a part of the Wall as a memorial to freedom. Gradually more and more artists became involved and we are now the largest open-air gallery in the world."

Key rings and doorstops

Police guard the Wall against souvenir hunters

Berliners themselves took parts of it, knocking off fragments to take home as mementos.

"I defected from East Berlin four months before the Wall came down," recalls conference producer Barbara Schulter, 52. "I now have a small piece of it sitting on my mantelpiece. It's like a part of my history, a reminder of a time that is gone forever."

Caterer Matt Retski, 34, grew up in West Berlin. "I was working in the Caribbean when I heard that the Wall had fallen," he says. "As soon as I got back I went out with some friends, knocked off a large chunk and took it away in a wheelbarrow.

"I wanted a memento of something I had lived with my whole life. There was also a need to feel that I was somehow a part of dismantling the Wall, that I was involved in its end."

A lucrative market in Berlin Wall souvenirs soon developed, with fragments sold off to tourists as key rings, paperweights, pendants, doorstops, bookends, paving slabs and even wall clocks.

One enterprising East Berliner, Volker Pawlowski, made a fortune from Berlin Wall postcards, each incorporating a tiny nodule of the wall.

"I sell 30,000 to 40,000 per year," he announced proudly. "You simply cannot imagine today's souvenir trade without them."

Larger pieces were bought up by the world's museums -- American institutions proving particularly enthusiastic -- or by multinational corporations like Microsoft, whose U.S. headquarters is now home to several slabs.

The Wall opens

Paris-based art curator Sylvestre Verger has organised a travelling display of 40 separate pieces of the Wall, each carrying a painting by a different artist.

A school ground in Trelleborg, Sweden, has a section of the wall as the centrepiece of its playground.

There can be few countries in the world that don't have at least a piece of it on display somewhere.

By far the greatest part of the Wall, however, ended up neither in museums, nor art galleries, nor playgrounds, nor on the mantelpieces of Berlin's residents.

Rather, it was simply bulldozed and crushed for use in post-reunification road-building programmes.

An ignominious end, perhaps, but in many ways a fitting one, for what once existed to keep people apart is now, in a sense, helping them move towards each other again.