The continued fall of the Berlin Wall

I went to Amsterdam at the end of last week. I was only gone for two days, but when I returned to the German capital, I was shocked to see that a piece of the Berlin Wall, which I walk past regularly, had gone.

Overnight government workers had come along and yanked it out of its foundations, to make way for a new environment ministry which is being built on the site on Erna-Berger Strasse just off Potsdamer Platz.

You may think the less that remains of that monstrosity which divided a country for 28 years, the better. But it is getting ever harder to imagine what that division might have been like. This is of particular importance to young people and visitors to the city, and for Berlin itself, whose identity is inextricably linked to that of the wall.

Bits of the structure remain dotted around the city, but they are getting fewer and fewer each year. I was particularly fond of the 18-metre stretch near Potsdamer Platz as it was the section I stumbled across one cold October night in 1990 on my first visit to Berlin.