AP PHOTOS: Parts of Berlin Wall around the world

The Associated Press

BERLIN (AP) — The wall that once separated East from West Berlin has largely disappeared from the city. The few sections that remain stand as potent monuments to the ideological divisions of the Cold War.

But 25 years after the Berlin Wall fell, some 120 parts of it can now be found in more than 40 countries, from Britain to South Africa and the United States.

One 8,000-pound piece has been placed outside the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. It was given to Reagan for his “unwavering dedication to humanitarianism and freedom over communism,” famously expressed in his 1987 speech in Berlin, in which he called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

Another section, outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, features graffiti of someone scaling the Wall in a bid for freedom.

In Cape Town, a segment can be found near the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, an organization dedicated to the man who helped overcome South Africa’s Apartheid system and later became its first black president.

And in London, a piece of the Wall now outside the Imperial War Museum extols passers-by to “change your life.”

Apart from the larger sections, hundreds of smaller pieces of the Berlin Wall have found their way into public and private collections around the world. Many were collected by trophy hunters, known as “Mauerspechte” or “Wall peckers,” who chipped away at the concrete barrier after the peaceful revolution of 1989 that signaled its end.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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