"A former National People’s Army barracks in the district of Rummelsburg in East Berlin, where the Bundeswehr, the Federal Armed Forces, stored and administered various segments of the Wall. I bought four parts at the basic price of 250 D-marks each – the Bundeswehr charged up to 10,000 D-marks for a painted segment, and in Monte Carlo they were auctioned off for even higher prices to museums and private collectors from all over the world. Now segments were being loaded onto trucks bound for Paris, where they were to be erected along the Champs Elysées and painted by German artists from the East and West.
Daniel Boulogne, a French businessman and an ardent collector, had given me the task of acquiring unpainted segments of the Wall. There were a few dozen lying about, some of them smeared with paint, others completely blank. I had seen many more the previous day, at a depot in Wollankstraße, by the S-Bahn tracks. Thousands of segments were piled up as high as two-storey houses, forming narrow gorges, streets and junctions. The snow only served to reinforce the spooky atmosphere they created. It was like a ghost city. 'You can pick whichever ones you want but you have to organise the transportation yourself. Each piece weighs two tonnes.' I was suddenly totally exhausted because I hadn’t reckoned with that. 'We have a few more back at the barracks, which we could load up for you with the Bundeswehr’s crane.'
Then in Rummelsburg, with three segments already loaded up, I spotted a piece of Wall which I instantly recognised, and then another: beneath a coat of white paint were the silhouettes of paintings made by the East Berlin artist Manfred Butzmann on 20 November 1989 at Potsdamer Platz. Back then, again on behalf of Daniel Boulogne, I had delivered two tonnes of paint from France to a group of artists in East Berlin. It was a cloak-and-dagger operation/They had carried out their work in the dead of night and afterwards received much coverage on the radio, on TV, and in the press: it was the first time anyone had dared to paint the Wall on the East side. The following day, the VoPos immediately covered it all up with white paint again.
As luck would have it, I now saw two of these historical relics in front of me. 'Stop! I want those two pieces there! Please unload the last one.' The men’s/workers’/soldiers’ first reaction was one of puzzlement and irritation, but then they even loaded up a few of the pipe-like elements that had rounded off the top of the Wall. The entire load was to be delivered the following day to the Daniel Boulogne Entreprise group in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie. I was already steeling myself for the following day’s recriminations: 'What are we supposed to do with these? We ordered blank segments!'
The painting project on the Champs Elysées never took place. Later, in 1999, these two segments were donated to Le Mémorial de Caen museum, where they have been on display and borne witness to history since the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Wall."
Jean Pichard (West Berlin)
(11 rankings) 
