Berlin Wall pieces at US presidential libraries

A presidential library is a museum of one man's time in office, and that is how each of these seven reads its segment. At College Station a twelve-foot section, still carrying its Berlin graffiti, is the centrepiece of an exhibit on the administration that was in office on 9 November 1989. At Yorba Linda the argument is about détente, and the segment is shown as the endpoint of a policy rather than the rubble of an event. At Grand Rapids it was presented to Gerald Ford in 1991, with Helmut Schmidt and James Callaghan present, for the Helsinki Final Act he counted as his greatest achievement in office. In Boston it is kept by the library of the president who told West Berliners in 1963 that he too was a Berliner; at Simi Valley Reagan welcomed the panel in person, seven months before his library opened, and the display rests on its two faces, a butterfly on one and bare grey concrete on the other.

The two older libraries had to argue harder. The Hoover library at West Branch went after a piece because four other libraries already had one, as what the Federal Foundation calls a victory trophy of the Cold War, and found its claim in Hoover's food programmes, which fed a starving German population after the First World War and German schoolchildren after the Second. At Hyde Park the piece is not a segment at all but Edwina Sandys's BreakFree, made from the figures she cut out of her Fulton sculpture, and read through Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. Between them the libraries bought from the New Jersey company that handled the GDR's American sales and received gifts from the German government, and in one case cannot say which: at Grand Rapids the Foundation records a purchase for 35,000 dollars and the earlier research a gift from the grocer Fred Meijer, and both accounts are kept.