Читать книгу Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?. 170 Sites around the World онлайн

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By then, Anseel’s passion for the Berlin Wall had grown even more. He began to collect everything he could find that had anything to do with the former border and the GDR. He was particularly taken with the East German Trabant car. Anseel bought four Trabants in the nineties, amongst them a version which was used by the National People’s Army. He also owns a first generation Trabant P 50, which he managed to have signed by Soviet Head of State, Michail Gorbachev, Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) politician, Günter Schabowski, and GDR figure skater, Katrina Witt. He is particularly proud of one Trabant, which he has covered with banknotes and coins from 75 countries.

It was this passion for Trabants that led him be in possession of two Wall segments. He came across an article in Supertrabi (a magazine for Trabant enthusiasts) by a Berlin-based Trabant fan, who then put him in touch with someone selling parts of the Wall. Anseel also convinced his then employer, the Flanders Expo in Ghent, to buy a piece and organise the transportation. One piece remained at Flanders Expo and Anseel put the second in his garden. It still stands there today, complete with a small white plaque with the words: “ORIGINAL BERLIN WALL / POTSDA[M] MERPLATZ / NO MORE WALLS!, / FREEDOM AND PEACE / ALL OVER THE WORLD”