Berlin Wall pieces in Ohio

Ohio's three sites each argue something different. At the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati a section stands beside the entrance of a museum about American slavery, placed to say that the struggle against unfreedom is one subject rather than several. At Capital University in Columbus the segment was shipped over as an attraction for the German pavilion of a 1992 flower show and left behind as a permanent loan when the show closed; its painting is on the face that used to point east, which almost nobody could reach, and a sign asks students not to add anything of their own. And the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Dayton obtained its first four segments by exchanging two transport aircraft of the Berlin airlift type for them, flew the sixteen tonnes to Ohio in a chartered Starlifter, and shows them behind a camouflaged Trabant, with two more that Thierry Noir painted for the museum specially.