Or did they give Usain Bolt all they had left?
This just seems like kind of an odd story, and it strikes me as bad journalism that there wasn’t a line or two explaining where they keep sections of the wall, whether any have previously been given out to visiting dignitaries, etc.:
http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/trackandfield/news/story?id=4417296
Bad journalism? Not really. The German government, and certainly Berlin’s, too, has pieces for just such occaisions. It was a wall stretching across the entire city, and Berlin is NOT a small little stadt. The thing was quite tall, too. There was plenty of it left over even several years after reunification.
As of a few years at least one outdoor, more-or-less intact segment remained. You’re not supposed to touch (fenced off and all). The last time I was in Berlin, on a college class trip, every* single student other than myself *went crazy and attacked the damn thing with keys, kicks, and thrown rocks to try and break off a piece. :rolleyes:
I’d be surprised if it’s still there.
I have a piece of the Berlin Wall. Not a 3-ton piece, of course. Mine is more like the size of a fingernail.
After the Wall came down lots of people busted up lots of pieces, including some that were sold as souveniers. If it hadn’t been for the German government putting the remains in storage it would have been collected into oblivion.
I recall that there were many scam artists who sold random pieces of concrete as genuine “parts of the Berlin Wall” to unsuspecting tourists.
I had a genuine piece of it at one time myself (I visited Berlin in summer 1990, well after the wall came down but weeks before political unification, so the area of the wall was a strange untended wasteland of sorts, filled with chisel-wielding tourists) but lost track of it years ago.
I had just thought by now there would be a section in place, roped off and guarded as an exhibit; and maybe another section somewhere in a museum. I wouldn’t have thought they would have enough in storage to give an athlete a two-ton section of it. I would assume if they give that much to him, they are going to find other occasions in the future when they’ll want to do something similar; so I wonder how much of a stockpile they have of this non-renewable resource.
There is, it’s free and quite good.
Thanks for the link, Fish Cheer. I wonder: did they have to restore that area of the wall to make it look authentic, or had it been protected from the aforementioned chisel-wielding tourists all along?
Maybe Bolt’s wall segment was “shaved” off the end of this exhibit?
Not in Berlin, so not directly on topic. However, I think it may be of interested to some in the thread.
There are also sections on display in the US. The Newseumhas a large piece:
The Berlin Wall was strong enough to stop a tank, but it couldn’t stop news from getting into East Germany by word of mouth, smuggled messages or radio and television. This gallery tells the story of how news and information helped topple a closed and oppressive society.
-D/a
Their website has a section called “History of the Memorial” that says:
No way. This is an official, quite serious memorial to the victims of the Wall. I don’t think they’d chop off bits just to hand them to random sportspeople.
There’s another section left up, covered in fantastic artwork and graffiti. (That’s me and my husband, in 2007)
Is that the East Side Gallery?
Yup. It was pretty neat, but we didn’t have a whole lot of time to visit, and since it was in the evening, none of my pictures turned out very good.
There’s another slab at the Reagan Library:
And another in the sculpture garden at Kentuck Knob, in western Penna.:
I have a tiny piece, given to me by a friend who was in Berlin at the time East Germany fell.
The wall was nearly 100 miles long. There’s plenty to go around.
Or at least there was to begin with. But given that most Germans wanted it torn down for the most part for practical as well as symbolic reasons, and given also that it is massively heavy, awkward, bulky, etc, there have to be logistical issues to preserve more than a pretty small fraction of that length in storage.
From **FishCheer’s **quote about the history of the memorial:
So I take it the cemetery was fenced in and thus kept tourists and their pickaxes away for the eleven months or so preceding that date?
As I say, there was plenty of wall to go around, and tourists didn’t really remove that much of it. Hard to chip off a large piece with a pickaxe, and harder still to tote it around on holiday. The Sophienkirche cemetery isn’t even fenced in, IIRC.
My point though was that if you’re going to have a historical exhibit, you need it to be in “original mint condition”. Even if tourists only nibbled around the edges, that wouldn’t seem to qualify. (When I was there in August 1990, there was more gone than still standing in the area visible to me.)
At Main Street Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas you can piss on a piece of the Berlin Wall. Kinda.
How’s that? The most famous protected “historical exhibits” aren’t exactly in top-top condition. Think of Stonehenge, the Acropolis, the Colusseum of Rome, the Sphinx, the Great Wall of China…
Even more recent things like the Alamo, the Taj Mahal, or Caernarfon Castle are falling down. Typically, the only buildings of historical significance which are preserved in “mint condition” are those which are still in use: the White House, Windsor Castle, the Louvre, Versailles, and so on.
Sections of the wall aren’t even all that expensive.
