BERLIN -- When a neighborhood group on a walk through an overgrown patch of land in central Berlin came across a 65-foot stretch of concrete sprayed with graffiti and covered with vines, nobody was sure what to make of it.
"We started debating, and someone suggested that maybe it was part of the Berlin Wall," said Ephraim Gothe, a city councilor for urban development in the Mitte district of Berlin, who was leading the group on a tour in early June.
He alerted authorities, leading to confirmation that the group had discovered an original piece of the wall's outer defense perimeter, which prevented East Germans from approaching the principal barrier, near the Chausseestrasse border crossing.
The 65-foot piece went unnoticed for nearly three decades, largely obscured by the construction of the new seat of Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, said Gesine Beutin, a spokesman for the Berlin Wall Foundation.
"It's still really covered, although it is surrounded by new houses and people could see it from their windows," Gothe said.
Now, Berlin has added the section of wall to the list of city monuments under historical protection.
The piece was not part of the barrier on the western side, the section most commonly associated with the Berlin Wall, with its L-shaped foot and circular pipe at the top, Beutin said.
Instead, it is a thinner, smaller barrier that "looked like any other wall," she said -- which also helped to explain why it went unnoticed for so long.
The fragment of the barrier, perhaps the ultimate symbol of the Cold War, is at a site owned by a real estate company that manages public properties on a parcel of land above where the Panke river is channeled underground.
There are plans to uncover the river and turn the area into a park, into which the newly discovered piece of the wall could be integrated, Gothe said.
The wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, and as Berlin residents rushed to tear down a barrier that had defined their lives and divided their families, historians hoped to preserve some pieces for posterity.
Over the years, as the generations shift and younger people find it increasingly difficult to imagine a world in which they would have been unable to move freely from Berlin to Prague to Vienna, the few remnants of the Berlin Wall have taken on an increasing importance.
"When the wall fell, everyone in Berlin just wanted it to go -- they couldn't look at it any longer," Beutin said. "It took awhile before we were able to say that it was important to preserve parts for history. We need places and objects where we can keep the memories alive."
SundayMonday on 09/02/2018