Twenty five years after its fall, more pieces of the Berlin wall are scattered across the globe – from Seattle to South Korea, Cape Town to Canberra – than remain in the city itself

Behind the caretaker’s cottage in Berlin’s botanical gardens, hidden from the visitors’ view, stands a bit of concrete European history: a piece of the Stützwandelement UL 12-11, 3.2m high and 1.2m wide, weighing 2.6 tonnes, with yellow and blue graffiti on one side. Between 1961 and 1990, around 54,000 of these concrete slabs made up the western side of the Berlin Wall.



The collection stashed away in the botanical gardens’ depot belongs to the city senate: they are gifts, to be handed out at grand state visits. Receiving a slab of wall is a bit of a mixed blessing: you need a crane to load it on to a van, so the pick-up alone costs at least €2,000. Shipping it overseas sets you back another five grand, so sometimes recipients contrive to leave their presents behind.

Still, out of an original collection of 30 slabs only eight remain, and five of them already carry reservation tags, for the Philippines, Cleveland and Bochum. One secretary in the senate has already been in touch with the caretaker to say that she wants to be there when the last piece of the wall gets picked up, to wave it goodbye with her handkerchief.

“Where is the wall?” is still the first question many tourists ask when they visit the German capital. But 25 years after its fall, more pieces of the Berlin Wall are scattered across the globe than remain in the city itself.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest August 1961: A crowd of West Berliners gather at the wall while an East German soldier patrols on the other side. Photograph: Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

The wall’s overtly symbolic nature has accelerated this dispersal. While many Berliners couldn’t wait to see the back of the barrier that brought tragedy to so many of their lives, people outside Germany were keen to get their hands on pieces of concrete that suddenly seemed to stand for democracy, civil courage, and the west’s triumph over the east.



While Germany’s Federal Agency for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship lists only one segment of the wall in Russia, almost a hundred pieces are spread across the US.

Berliners had started chiselling away at the wall immediately after the border had opened on 9 November 1989, and the first offer for an entire segment, from a Bavarian businessman, had arrived only a day after.

The transitional GDR government, in desperate need of foreign currency, eventually overcame moral reservations on 4 January 1990, ordering the structure’s dismantlement and granting the “commercial use of complete segments”. With a grim stroke of historical irony, border guards were made to protect the wall from acts of vandalism.

What is generally talked of as the “Berlin Wall” was in fact two walls: the eastern, so-called “hinterland” wall, and the western wall – which were separated by a death strip. Particularly the graffiti-decorated western segments of wall proved popular with investors post-1989: one Japanese company offered $185,000 for a single piece. Others were sold for similar sums at a lavish auction held in Monaco in June. The less photogenic sections, making up the majority of the original wall, were crushed and used for road and motorway construction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A section of the Berlin Wall at the Steinbach Mennonite heritage village in Manitoba, Canada. Photograph: Bert Hoferichter/Alamy

A number of segments were returned to Berlin for commemorative purposes, though rarely to the exact spot where they had stood originally. The longest stretch can be found at the Eastside Gallery in Friedrichshain, though the paintings and graffiti here were added as recently as 2009.



There are a further 212m of wall at the Topography of Terror memorial, 70m at the memorial on Bernauer Strasse, a few isolated segments on Potsdamer Platz and a kind of “Berlin Wall Stonehenge” in Treptow, where anyone can paint on the segments.

The Berlin Wall chippings sold in the souvenir shop at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie museum for €3 a piece come from a depot close to Tegel airport, owned by Volker Pawlikowski. While the government was still working out to do with the wall, he had snapped up 30 segments from a recycling yard.

Museum shop manager Wieland Giebel insists that Pawlikowski’s wall pieces are still genuine, though he makes no secret of the fact that they’ve been recently touched up with a spray can.

Around 600 segments have found a new home outside Germany, making up over 140 memorials worldwide, in places as far flung as Australia and the Bahamas. There are five pieces of the Berlin Wall in Uijeongbu, South Korea, 30 kilometres from the North Korean border: a symbol of the hope that the two countries may one day be peacefully united.

One section has found its way to Up-Park Camp in Kingston, Jamaica, after it was given to Usain Bolt by Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit at the 2009 Athletic World Championships.

The largest collection outside Germany lies near the Polish village of Sosnovka outside Wroclaw, where the dentist Ludwik Wasecki has assembled over 40 wall segments and arranged them into art installations.

Some wall segments might have gone missing forever. In May 1998, US president Bill Clinton was meant to be presented with a segment of the wall during his visit to Berlin, but had to skip the presentation ceremony because a previous meeting had overrun. Instead, the German embassy agreed to present Clinton with the wall in the US.

The segment was transported from Berlin to Hamburg, and then shipped to Baltimore, but because Clinton was by now embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal, the presentation never took place and the piece remained in storage in Baltimore, where it eventually vanished.

President Clinton had been symbolically photographed in front of a section of the wall only a few months earlier. On 11 February 1998, he had announced the enlargement of Nato, to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, at a press conference at the US state department in Washington. The backdrop was a graffitied segment of the wall, visibly displaying the word “Freedom”.

However, an enquiry to the state department revealed another story. Lugging the wall up to the 8th floor of the US state department, where Clinton’s press conference took place, would have been far too much of an effort: the wall in the photographs was only a cardboard replica.