GERMANY:The German capital is filled with memorials, mostly exercises in steel and concrete to exorcise the horrors of the Third Reich.
Now the architect of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik has called for a new memorial celebrating Germany's proudest moment: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification.
"We Germans should be proud of the first successful revolution and mark this unique event in a worthy fashion," says Egon Bahr, calling for the memorial to be ready by 2009, the 60th anniversary of the founding of West Germany and the 20th anni- versary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In the years since 1989, the ruins of the wall served as a reminder of Germany's internal ideological - and later physical - division that lasted four decades and cost hundreds of lives.
Now that the wall has all but vanished from the cityscape, there is little to remind visitors of the division or unity.
Mr Bahr wants a "national freedom and unity memorial" to be erected in front of the now vanished Kaiser's palace, the site of the East German People's Palace which is being demolished.
A competition will establish a design, but Mr Bahr says the inscription should recall the chant of demonstrators before and after the fall of the wall: "We are the people! - we are one people!"
Such a memorial would be a novel addition to Berlin's memorial landscape and the proposal will prompt a lively debate.
