BERLIN, GERMANY.- The portrait of a US soldier is seen behind wooden crosses at a memorial dedicated to the victims of the Berlin wall near the Berlin Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie. Germany prepares to mark the 15th anniversary of the day the Berlin came crashing down 09 November 1989, a date also marking the end of the Cold War.

Official destruction of the Wall began on 13th June 1990 in the Bernauer Strasse. Demolition work was commenced by 300 East German border guards, and completed by 600 sappers of the Bundeswehr, equipped with 13 bulldozers, 55 excavators, 65 cranes and 175 lorries. The Wall between the two Berlins was completely razed on the following 30th November, with the exception of six segments kept to commemorate the event. The rest disappeared in November 1991. The concrete blocks were crushed and reused notably to make roads ; 250 sectionts were auctioned off for anything from DM 10,000 to DM 150,000.

Today, the Wall is barely visible, although where it stood has been marked out in downtown Berlin over a distance of 20 kilometres (12 mi.), with a red line or a double row of cobblestones. All that remains are a few vestiges here and there, kept as memorials. The people of Berlin were impatient to see the back of this painful scar. Which makes it so difficult for us to imagine now what it was like for a great metropolis to be split down the middle by an iron and concrete curtain. Nevertheless, although Berlin has been completely transformed since 1989, not all traces of the Wall have been erased from the city or from people’s minds. As the German writer Peter Schneider admitted," demolishing the Wall in the head will take longer than it will take for a demolition firm to do the same job ".