"We bought that tower on eBay," Klausmeier explains, adding that it had been authentically repositioned on an original concrete base.
These remnants are hard to find, and Klausmeier, who, in 2001, executed the first detailed inventory of the scant remaining traces of the wall, knows how difficult it can be to satisfy a wish - especially among tourists - to see more of Berlin's most renowned monument.

But while some have pushed for reconstruction of the wall, Klausmeier, and the architects who won a 2007 competition to build the memorial, have been adamant that any rebuilding would be in bad taste. "We said we can not possibly reconstruct the sheer horror and the fear that the wall produced," says Klausmeier.

Instead, breaks in the original wall have been re-imagined using rusted metal columns spaced apart to allow visitors to walk among them. Meanwhile, metal lines in the ground mark the inner walls. Wandering around, one appreciates the elaborate and intractable scale of what the GDR euphemistically called "the anti-Fascist protection barrier".

The best-known landmark at the site - part of the first section that opened in 2009-10 - is the Window of Commemoration, showing images of all 136 "known" people killed, usually shot dead, while trying the breach the wall. The memorial also honours the larger numbers who languished in prisons for attempting to penetrate the barrier.

Visitors to the site seem to feel its importance. A British couple who spoke to Al Jazeera were glad they'd finally found part of the wall at Bernauer Strasse - none of the wall survives, for instance, at the iconic Checkpoint Charlie.

"It's good the way you can see where people jumped out of buildings. You get a sense of what actually happened here," they said. The couple seemed visibly affected. "The people went through so much, it really should be remembered. It's a pity that they tried to black it all out."
The service of memorial
But talk to Berliners who grew up with the wall, and attitudes to memorials and commemorations are mixed - indeed, a survey released this month [Deutsche] showed that one in five East Berliners - and more than a third of all Berliners - believe the building of the wall was justified.

"It's only recently that they feel we ought to do this. It feels manufactured, like there's no real emotional background to it," says Anne Wizorek of the August 13 commemoration.

Wizorek, 29, grew up in the suburbs of then East Berlin and remembers chipping away at the wall with hammers alongside her family in 1989 - chunks of the wall were sent by the Wizoreks as presents to family in the West before the divided clan were finally reunited that Christmas.

Wizorek, who still lives in East Berlin, says the Berlin wall is "overly fetishised". "It's much bigger than just the wall. Maybe [it] tells people more about the daily life in the GDR than just the crimes," she says.

Interestingly, Wizorek has never properly visited the Berlin Wall Memorial. Norbert Polster has never visited the site either, even though he grew up just metres away.

It's as if the initial ambivalence about remembering the wall remains for those who lived on either side of it.
Polster, who, like his mother, despaired that the wall collapsed, is now glad it's gone; but he's not sure about how to commemorate it.

"It's important to remember that walls are not the answer. But it's also important to remember all the walls in the world. In Berlin the wall fell, but in Gaza the wall remains, and between the USA and Mexico there's also a wall," he says.
"
I think it would be nice to remember the Berlin wall, but also to remember all walls that exist today."

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