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A woman walks along the former Berlin Wall. (Reuters)
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Berlin, March 5: In November 1989, the Berlin Wall opened, and soon after was being torn to pieces by jubilant crowds from both sides.
Almost a quarter of a century later, Berliners again took to the streets over the wall — only this time to protect what is left of it.
Late last week, when construction workers began dismantling a roughly 70-foot section of the wall’s longest remaining expanse — a nearly mile-long monument to peace that is covered in paintings and is known as the East Side Gallery — protesters turned up in droves. The first hastily organised demonstration on Friday drew several hundred, but over the weekend thousands of people massed to protect the huge concrete slabs from being relocated to an adjacent park.
They were particularly incensed that the project was to make way for an access road for new luxury apartments — helpful for a city whose budget could use bolstering from development, not so helpful for ordinary Germans.
“History should never be a luxury,” read one placard, capturing the protesters’ dismay over gentrification.
City officials and the developer, Maik Uwe Hinkel of Living Bauhaus, responded by noting that the space would also serve the construction of a nearby pedestrian bridge over the river, to replace one destroyed in World War II, according to the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung.
Many residents view the remaining row of tall concrete slabs as an important testimonial to life in Communist East Germany, when the 45-km barrier encircling West Berlin severely hampered their contact with the other side, and they are intent on keeping the East Side Gallery intact.
A popular tourist attraction, the stretch of wall snakes along Berlin’s Spree river and is emblazoned with art from 1990 that was restored in 2008 — colourful graffiti and famous murals like the “Fraternal Kiss”, which shows the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev and his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, locking lips. The work crews removed only one four-foot-wide slab before the protesters blocked them.
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