In front of the Imperial War Museum in south London, two young women are sitting on a bench next to the museum’s most Instagrammed object – an immense slab of the Berlin Wall, on which, inside a cartoonish open mouth, has been sprayed the slogan: “Change your life.”

The women are German students, and so are acutely aware of the wall’s significance. Angelina Bender, from Frankfurt, says: “For many families in Germany, the wall was a big struggle. Many were separated because of the wall. So it’s kind of strange when people see it as art, or something to look at.”

Her reservations aside, the wall’s popularity as an artefact, selfie backdrop and souvenir is likely to increase this year, as the 30th anniversary of its fall, in November 1989, draws near. The museum is making its own preparations to mark the anniversary, and according to Carl Warner, IWM’s head of cold war and late 20th century conflict, the wall is more relevant now than ever.

“We talk about walls a lot at the moment, particularly in the US, and suddenly everyone is forced to have an opinion on the building of barriers. Brexit, obviously, comes up when we talk about voluntarily putting a gap between one country and another group of countries.

“There are some conflicts where it is difficult to unpack the meaning of an object, particularly with a collection like ours. That’s not something you really have to do with the Berlin wall – it’s got instantaneous currency.”

The currency is not only metaphorical. Next week, six complete sections of the wall will go on sale in a British auction house, giving deep-pocketed collectors a rare opportunity to own part of one of the most potent symbols of division of the 20th century.

“In terms of precedent, we don’t have a lot to go on,” says James Rylands of Summers Place Auctions, which is selling the sections in two lots with guide prices of £5-8,000 and £12-18,000.

“Most of what we sell is based on what something similar has fetched. But while you can look to see what a Georgian dining table goes for, looking for a section of Berlin wall is rather different. You can value diamonds, but what price do you put on history?”

James Rylands, of Summers Place Auctions, with one of the sections of the Berlin Wall up for sale next week. Photograph: Andrew Hasson/Getty Images

Their buyers could be anyone from wealthy oligarchs to art collectors, Rylands speculates, though he says his personal preference would be that they end up on public display. In the three decades since it fell, sections of the wall have been scattered across the globe, some displayed as symbols of peace, others with less rarified uses, such as the section used as a urinal in a Las Vegas casino.

Once the wall had “fallen” as a political barrier, says Warner, its physical demolition began quite quickly, with much of the concrete broken up and used as hardcore in construction. But for many of those present in 1989, he says, there was a powerful urge to preserve through collecting – and inevitably, later selling – souvenirs.

The idea of collecting sections of Berlin wall may be distasteful to some, but if the number of vendors around the Brandenburg Gate is anything to go by, the market is a healthy one.

Selling postcards with fragments of the wall enclosed in plastic windows, Grigory, a vendor wearing a Russian ushanka hat with ear-flaps, says: “I have lots more where this came from. It is authentic, I can guarantee you that.” The Spanish tourists gathered around seem unconcerned. “This looks real to me,” says Pablo Vega, clutching the piece of wall embedded in perspex he had just bought for €6.

The Berlin Wall in 1989. Photograph: ANONYMOUS/AP

One Berlin entrepreneur, Volker Pawlowski, acquired a stash of wall bits he spray paints and crushes, turning them into magnets, key rings and other souvenirs, and then sells with a certificate of authentication to tourist shops in the capital. He has enough to last for years, he says.

Hans Martin Fleischer is one of the few known owners of large slabs of authentic wall – he has four segments, each 3.6 metres high and weighing 2.7 tonnes, that were among the first to be removed by crane from Potsdamer Platz on 12 November 1989. He bought them for a five-figure sum in the early 1990s, and has kept them in storage ever since.

“For 10 years after its collapse, no one was interested in the Berlin Wall,” Fleischer says. “Then after 15, 20 years the authorities started saying: ‘Actually it’s not such a bad idea to keep some bits of it standing where they used to.”

The euphoric events surrounding the fall of the wall had such an impact on the bureaucrat, then 26, that he made a lighter, replica segment out of polystyrene that can be dismantled, and travels around the world with it, encouraging people to take selfies standing next to it while he gives talks on its history. “I see how fascinated people still are by the phenomenon, 30 years on,” he says.

“These segments are like documents or witnesses of history, as important as the American declaration of independence.”



