BERLIN -- It can be found on the Cape Town waterfront, a school campus in Mexico City and in the private collection of a Polish dentist. But there is scant evidence of the wall in Berlin these days.
Ten years after it was dramatically opened on Nov. 9, 1989, tourists are pounding the streets in the German capital in an often vain quest for remnants of the most famous Cold War barrier of them all."I only found it because my friend here is an East German," said one middle-aged Briton pointing to her companion as they stood by a section of wall in Bernauerstrasse, an obscure corner of a northeastern suburb.
"But there is no information about it here, no explanations or anything," she said. "It's almost as if it's being hidden away," she added, sharing the sense of bemusement felt by many disappointed wall-hunters.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Berliners do not show off what became a detested symbol of tyranny that tore families apart and stunted the course of thousands of lives.
As muscle-flexing between the Soviet Union and the West over the fate of Germany brought the Cold War to its most explosive point, Berlin had by 1961 emerged as its most likely flashpoint.
Fleeing the impoverishment of a dysfunctional East German economy and growing state oppression, tens of thousands of refugees from the Soviet sector poured monthly into West Berlin, gradually draining East Berlin of its lifeblood.
Then, in the early hours of Aug. 13, local trains between east and west stopped running. East German troop carriers and armored cars lined up along the sector boundary. Behind them, convoys of trucks bore rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts and pneumatic drills.
Directed with military precision by Politburo member Erich Honecker, who would go on to lead the state until its final days, the "Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier" was going up.
Working in round-the-clock shifts to the loud jeers of thousands of West Berliners, laborers took just 53 hours to erect a tankproof concrete barrier around the west side of the famous Brandenburg Gate in the middle of the city.
In Bernauerstrasse, troops bricked up doorways and ground floor windows of the houses that physically formed the eastern boundary there. When residents risked broken necks to escape from upstairs windows, they were bricked up, too.
Throughout the autumn, the wall was extended to a 97-mile divide encircling the whole of West Berlin, of which 27 miles lay directly between the two halves of the city center.
Hundreds of dead-end streets were created at a stroke as thoroughfares were cut in two. Just eight crossing points remained, including one for mail and one for the coffins of those unlucky enough not to die on their native side of town.
"I remember that hundreds of people were protesting," said Hagen Koch, who as a 19-year-old Stasi (secret police) corporal was drafted into the cartographical unit responsible for delineating the wall.
"But at the time, I was 300 percent convinced we were the good guys and that we were the ones who wanted peace," recalls Koch, who now organizes historical tours around Berlin.
For Koch and thousands of others, however, that conviction wore thin as its lethal intent became obvious.
Confronted with escape attempts, border guards initially held their fire in the belief that the number of bids -- then still averaging around 50 an hour -- would fall to a trickle.
Many, including Koch, now believe the first border killing was six days after the wall was erected as guards shot a 24-year-old man trying to swim to the west across the River Spree.
But the death that firmly established the wall's vileness in the eyes of the world was that of 18-year-old Peter Fechter, hit by gunfire as he made a dash over a section of barbed wire a year later.
For nearly an hour, he bled to death in no-man's land, untended by border guards and out of reach of West Berliners, as Western photographers recorded the scene.
Over the years, a number of improvements were added to the wall -- sometimes, paradoxically, with equipment supplied by West German manufacturers.
Gradually, the hastily built original barrier was bolstered by 300 watchtowers surveying a floodlit terrain that included a moat, a run for guard dogs, concrete bunkers and a "killing ground" that even the border guards could not enter.
On the Western side, meanwhile, it had become Berlin's top tourist attraction.
By its collapse in 1989, more than 5,000 people had successfully crossed over the wall, spawning tales of escapees hidden in coffins, making the crossing in hot-air balloons or do-it-yourself submarines across the river.
Well over 100 died in the attempt, around half of the 265 people who perished along the East-West border as a whole.
When the East German government fell, a spontaneous consensus emerged among East and West Berliners alike that the wall must go -- and as fast as possible.
Even before reunification a year later, East German officials ordered troops to tear down the wall. Free beer and sausages were laid on for West Berliners who helped in the dismantling.
Whole sections were recycled, eventually disappearing within the foundations of a new ring road around Berlin.
But as Berliners rushed to bury a painful reminder, there was surging foreign interest in acquiring a tangible piece of modern history.
Curators charged with selling wall sections at an auction in Monte Carlo in 1990 secured 40,000 marks ($21,000) for some segments -- prices which many collectors see, in retrospect, as bargains.
Now, parts of the Berlin Wall are scattered in memorials as far as Honolulu and Latvia.
Aside from Bernauerstrasse, the other main preserved segment is close to the former Checkpoint Charlie crossing point on the south side of the Brandenburg Gate.
Viewed properly only by braving traffic to stand in the middle of a narrow, cobbled road, it is further boxed off from sight by an exhibition on the Nazi Gestapo secret police on whose former headquarters it happens to stand.
City Development Senator Peter Strieder speaks repeatedly of the need to create something depicting the full brutality of the wall.
"As a Berliner, I feel the lack of a proper historical recognition of the wall quite sorely," said one senior town official. "But I doubt whether the political will exists to create one even today."