The Berliners had, and still have, a love-hate relationship with their Wall. City authorities are now considering buying back 100 metres of it from a man they initially paid to take it away.
It was once the most reviled border in Europe, if not the world, yet the West Berliners transformed their side into a massive work of art, making it a symbol of protest and attracting millions of visitors.
There is nothing small or moderate about the Berlin Wall, and it persists, not just in the minds of Berliners, who still classify themselves and each other as western or eastern.
It remains one of the biggest tourist attractions to the new German capital, even though hardly any of it remains. Huge crowds took care of that in a spontaneous outbreak of champagne-driven demolition work 10 years ago.
That mass of people, who now feature on postcards and T-shirts in souvenir shops, were followed swiftly by fellow citizens with an eye for business.
Few visitors leave the city without a piece of the wall stashed away in their handbag or rucksack, each one with a certificate of authenticity or memories of a conversation with a man who swore he chipped it off himself. It's been suggested that if every piece of brightly-coloured concrete, sold in little presentation boxes and plastic bubbles set into postcards, is genuine, then the wall would have reached to the moon and back.
The man who has 100 metres of the real thing has been guarding it jealously at a secret location outside the city. Mr Wienfried Prem was one of the contractors brought in by the Berlin building authorities at the end of 1989 to dismantle the wall and crunch it up to be used as rubble for such mundane projects as road foundations. He disposed of 30 km of wall and today must be kicking himself that he did so.
Now he is determined to make the most of what he saved by selling it back to the city.
Mr Prem has a vision - he wants to install a section of his wall in each city district which had part of the border and then invite some of the artists who decorated the wall originally, to come back to the city to recreate some of their graffiti.
But the wall, even if reconstructed only in small sections for the tourists, and to remind Berliners of their recent past, will have to be protected from overzealous history and politics students. So Mr Prems's pieces of repainted and reconstructed wall will be covered with plexiglass, if all goes according to plan.
He has also offered to sell his stretch of the wall to the mayor's office for an undisclosed fee.
Mr Prem is not being chased away, or denounced as an exploiter of the city's history - the city government is ready to pay hard cash for genuine bits of its own history.
A spokeswoman for the city's senate cultural office said: "Before we can decide anything, an offer must be put on the table before us. That will then be looked over and the financial side of things carefully considered."
With the approach of the 10th anniversary of its fall, some attention in Berlin is focused on the harsh realities of what was essentially a takeover by the West.
Wages are significantly lower in the former East Germany than they are in the West and the number of top managers from the East in German companies is probably lower than that for women. In the East, social indicators such as unemployment and health are all way down the scale when compared with the West.