GERMANY: The longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still standing, the East Side Gallery, has fallen victim to property developers.
Since the rest of the Berlin Wall vanished, tourists have flocked to the 1.3 km stretch of the wall, the only place to retain even a hint of the hulking menace of the concrete structure.
Now a US billionaire property developer has received permission from the city to punch a 45m hole in the wall as part of a new stadium complex.
"It's the end of the East Side Gallery and all because the people in the city government here have no clue about the value of the wall. It's why people come to the city," said Gerd Glanze, who has sold souvenirs here for the last nine years.
Across the road, bulldozers and builders are preparing the ground for a new 17,000-seater ice hockey and basketball arena. The €150 million project will be completed by 2008 and will include, across the busy, six-lane street, a pier with access to the river Spree.
"Forget about history. Money talks," said one local hostel owner with a shrug.
With one in five unemployed, the Berlin state government has been bending over backwards to find investors for the German capital and the new stadium is the linchpin in a plan to redevelop a largely derelict 180-hectare section in the eastern city centre.
A spokesman for stadium developer Anschutz Entertainment said the plan to remove the 45-metre section of the wall had been agreed with the city "for many years".
The "anti-Fascist protection wall", erected on August 13th, 1961, claimed 215 lives before East German authorities opened borders to the west on November 9th, 1989.
After Berliners and tourists chipped away concrete souvenirs, most of the wall was ground up and used in Autobahn foundations. Just three sections of wall remain in Berlin, but all have been stripped of the razor and trip-wire, attack dogs and self-firing machine guns used to seal the border.
The East Side Gallery came into being in 1990 when 118 artists from around the world each claimed a stretch of the Mühlenstrasse wall and covered it with colourful murals including the famous Honecker-Brezhnev kiss.
Yesterday, a stork perched on the river bank watched as a builder attached hooks to the inside of the wall to aid the removal in the coming days of 37 panels, each 1.2 metres wide. "As far as I'm concerned, they should get rid of the whole shitty thing," the builder muttered.
On the street side, the wall's famous murals have fallen victim to vandals over the years. Now, despite a 1993 preservation order, the East Side Gallery has fallen to economic interests.
"It's terrible to hear because this is one of my favourite places in Berlin," said local woman Katrin Schlüter. "The trouble is that a small group of people are determined to make Berlin nice and clean for investors and tourists. But it won't work here. Berlin is scruffy and will stay that way."