BERLIN: For two decades, Volker Pawlowski was a construction worker in West Berlin, the last outpost of capitalism inside the grey Communist world.
Since German reunification 12 years ago, Pawlowski has made his living dismantling the last remnants of the East’s most hated symbol, the Berlin Wall, becoming the commissar of trade in colourful graffiti-sprayed concrete relics of the Cold War.
When hundreds of people climbed the Berlin Wall to cheer the end of German division in November 1989, building site worker Pawlowski celebrated with millions of others, but never thought the event would radically change his career.
Today, 90 per cent of all the chunks of Wall sold in Berlin come from Pawlowski. He gave up his old job and now has several employees; in Berlin’s souvenir shops, he is known as “the man who owns the Wall”.
Germany celebrated the anniversary of reunification on October 3 and the Brandenburg Gate, which was part of the dividing line between the two Germanys, will be unveiled after months of renovation.
Pawlowski, 46, like dozens of others in the few months after the Wall came down, used to stand at the Gate and sell chunks of the Wall from a little stall.
“There were hundreds of people selling Wall. I used to buy my pieces from people who had just hammered them off the remaining parts of the Wall,” he said.
But the job was tiring and the income moderate. Pawlowski soon thought there was more to be made of the 106 kms of concrete that had surrounded West Berlin and which were now starting to be removed from the city to be recycled.
“I just called around the recycling sites, and asked whether they had any Wall blocks I could buy,” Pawlowski said.
He ended up with about 300 metres of Wall, each segment weighing 2.6 tons and standing 3.60 metres high. Pawlowski paid about 5,000 euros for the lot.
The remains of the Berlin Wall now lie in various storage sites outside the city. Piled one on top of the other, the segments take up the size of a basketball field at one location alone. Pawlowski keeps some larger bits in his garage.
In 1991, he gave up his old job and started to develop his Wall line. “I had been in my job for 18 years and I was in a stable position. It was scary to give all that up,” said Pawlowski, who is married and has one daughter.
Between two and seven employees work in Pawlowski’s business, depending on orders. They cut the Wall into pieces, turn some into key rings, put bits of it into plastic globes or implant segments on postcards.
His competitors offering relics of the Communist past at the city’s tourist landmarks have a harder time drumming up custom.
On some days, Duman sells not a single item. His stall is one of a series at the US crossing Checkpoint Charlie which sell Soviet army badges, medals, East German police hats and chunks of the Wall.—Reuters
