Passing by the Berlin Wall

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I guess you've seen pictures of the original Berlin Wall: A wall full of colorful graffitti, against and for everything, in particular the former GDR. These days, what's left of the Berlin Wall is rather sad, at least from the artistic perspective. Most of the graffiti has been ruined by the so-called Mauerspechte (wall woodpeckers, or more appropriately called, I guess, wallpeckers).

Before the wall came down, the wallpeckers probably had the honorable goal of bringing down the wall, piece by piece, but after the wall came down, it was all about selling little pieces of the wall to tourists. As a consequence, most of the wall today looks like a rather hollow frame of concrete, with little left.

When passing by an old piece of the wall, though, I saw that people were at it again, putting graffiti on what's left of the wall. Whether the graffitti will stay on or will get chopped away I don't know, but it certainly makes you wonder whether socio-physical constructs like the wall can regreen and replenish themselves.

Worth a dissertation in psychology, I guess!

Copyright (©) 2007 Dirk Riehle. Some rights reserved. (Creative Commons License BY-NC-SA.) Original Web Location: http://www.riehle.org