Court orders demolition of Berlin Wall memorial

BERLIN - A court ordered the demolition of a controversial Berlin Wall memorial yesterday - six months after the 120-meter-long copy of the former East-West barrier was put up in the German capital to mark the collapse of Communist rule in the city.

Decked out with 1,065 crosses representing the victims of former East Germany's totalitarian regime, Berlin's first full-blown Wall memorial was erected in November last year to mark the 15th anniversary of the fall of the original Wall in 1989.

However yesterday judges at a Berlin court ordered the demolition of the memorial, after the bank which owns the site, near the former allied crossing point known as Checkpoint Charlie, demanded its return and complained that the lease had expired at the end of last year.

Alexandra Hildebrandt, owner of the nearby Checkpoint Charlie Museum which built the memorial, insisted yesterday that the court's decision was not a defeat for her attempts to establish a permanent Wall memorial in the city.

"We will not be clearing the site over the next few days. We are negotiating with the bank over the possibility of a sale," she said.

Thousands of tourists flocked to the "Wall memorial" after it was built. However the project was heavily criticised by former East German dissidents and human rights activists who argued that the monument was a "Disneyland version" of a murderous barrier at which hundreds of East Germans were shot for trying to escape to the West.

Controversy over the memorial has prompted the Berlin city government to launch plans for a permanent Wall memorial in the city. Such a monument has been conspicuously absent since the removal of most of the remnants of the real Wall during the early 1990s.

 Yesterday several foreign tourists in Berlin said they were shocked by the court's decision.

"There will now be nothing in Berlin to remind people where the Wall once stood !" exclaimed one tourist to Berlin's Inforadio news channel.

- INDEPENDENT