``There are more pieces of the Berlin Wall in the US probably than in Germany,'' says Gerald Livingston of the German Historical Institute in Washington. The authenticity of some of the pieces may be questioned, but not the power of their appeal.

``I think it is actually a symbol of the Cold War, of oppression,'' Livingston says, while acknowledging that for most Americans the event itself ``is ancient history''. ``The Berlin Wall is an eloquent symbol for the lack of freedom,'' says Tim Kenny, Director for research and news history at the Newseum, a media museum in Arlington, Virginia, which for several months has been exhibiting the largest collection of wall fragments outside of Germany. Eight large concrete pieces from the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin are on display, decorated by the painters Thierry Noir and Jurgen Grosse. The museum paid only transport and installation costs for the chunks, which were presented together with an authentic East German military watchtower. Other fragments crossed the Atlantic for less disinterested reasons, according to businessman Josef Sciamarelli, who said he sold pieces to the libraries of former presidents George Bush and Richard Nixon.

The market value of large pieces ranges from 35,000 to 75,000 dollars, less in the case of small pieces. Small pieces are less in demand, acknowledges Michael Ourand, who is offering for sale over the Internet pieces he collected on a 1990 trip to Germany and decorated.

Sales are picking up, he says, thanks to the search for unusual anniversary gifts by couples married in November 1989. A group of anti-nuclear activists has built a reduced-sized model of the old ``wall of shame'' near the Capitol, the seat of the US Congress here, which they call the ``wall of denial''. ``People have been lulled into a false sense of security. They have forgotten that the central tenet of the Cold War still exists,'' says Alistair Miller, an organiser of the ``wall of denial''.