"Immediately after the fall of the Wall, a handful of people started hacking pieces out of the Wall. More and more people joined in. You could hear the hammering against the concrete day and night. Everyone wanted to secure a piece of memory. The painted side of the Wall facing the West was particularly popular. Bit by bit, layer by layer, the endlessly long, colourful murals with all the quotes and tags disappeared. And soon after the surface was scraped clean, new texts and pictures were sprayed onto the blank concrete underneath. The concrete was hard and the tools used on it were for the most part modest and not very powerful. And yet the Wall got thinner and more porous, especially at the joints where the segments came together. It didn't take long before one could look through the gaps. The steel rods were exposed; the Wall's structure came to look like a metal-grilled opening. The People's Police Officers tried to seal the ensuing gaps with steel sheets: a breached border is no longer a border.
The first tourists had already arrived; curious onlookers and witnesses from all over the world, and in particular, from the East. They had never been able to touch the Wall, to see it from the other side. This was the first time for them.
The Wallpeckers' hard work now had a price tag attached to it: it was possible to borrow tools on site for a fee. Chisels, iron rods, crowbars and even jackhammers were available. The demolition operation had turned into a public happening, into a political act, into a demolition symbol of a new age. Long before the authorities had decided to tear down the Wall, thousands of people had already started the process of destroying it: soon everyone dared do it, soon everyone became something of a hero.
For those feeling bashful, impatient or weak, trestle tables boasted an array of souvenirs and relics, chapkas and medals; along with an ever growing selection of Wall fragments in all sizes and colours, some plain, some more creatively arranged. There were fragments set on plinths with barbed wire and red paint; others had been cast into transparent acryl glass with stamped official seals.
Piece by piece the Wall left the city. It went to Europe and all over the world. As a souvenir, a present, a memory. It made its way into a whole range of households, into all sorts of different cultures, ending up on mantle pieces and in glass vitrines. On occasion, it was hidden in some drawer or small box. The question as to what to take back from Berlin had become redundant. Business flourished. Each piece cost anything from 1 to 10 DM. And needless to say, it came with a guarantee: the coveted rock, the bit of concrete couldn't be anything but an original piece of the Wall. There was a constant supply available; and that's how, armed with a spray can in their hands, a group of Turkish youths from Kreuzberg came to apply much skill and effort to systematically spraying colourful squares on the blank Eastern side of the Wall. Then they used crowbars to stress the iron rods in the reinforced concrete so that entire chunks would break off. From time to time, a member of the People's Police would demand his share and hide a piece of the Berlin Wall under his uniform jacket. That's just how it happened, as a matter of course, without resistance: officially the Wall still belonged to the state of the GDR, and by extension, also to its army!
I photographed all this. It was interesting to watch and experience how quickly people reacted, adapted and also became unscrupulous. Their behaviour was not about being revengeful or defiant; rather, it had suddenly become totally acceptable for people to make money out of the situation. Now and then I ask myself what has become of all these Wall fragments and whether the symbolism that people once associated with them still has the same meaning for them today.
Years later, while walking along the former route of the Wall, I saw a memorial stone in the grass not very far from Berlin-Lichterfelde. A name and the dates 1975-1991 were inscribed on it. Once the fall of the Wall and reunification had already become history, a young Wallpecker had apparently been crushed when the upper part of the Wall, which was only held and supported by a couple of iron rods, collapsed on him."
Jean Pichard
