Berlin Wall pieces in Washington, D.C.

Washington holds the Wall in the places that tell the American version of the story, and two of its five records are about one object. The Newseum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue held the largest stretch outside Germany, eight twelve-foot segments and a BT-9 guard tower, until it closed on 31 December 2019 and put them into storage in Maryland. The building's new tenant, Johns Hopkins SAIS, then carried in a different piece of the same wall: the 7,000 lb fragment the Berlin Senate gave the school in 1997, which had stood for a quarter of a century in a courtyard on Massachusetts Avenue, chosen in a Berlin storage yard for a graffito its buyer misread as frei. Of everything in the atlas it is the neatest accident.

The other two came as gifts and carry names. The Signature Segment at the State Department's museum of diplomacy carries the signatures of twenty-seven people who had a part in 1989 and 1990, Bush, Kohl, Gorbachev, Wałęsa, Merkel and Genscher among them, collected as it toured Europe; it remains the property of a Leipzig energy company, on permanent loan since 2015. The slab in the Ronald Reagan Building was Daimler-Benz's present for the building's opening in 1998, from the border at the Brandenburg Gate, with graffiti sprayed two days after the crossing opened and a panel signed from the employees of Daimler-Benz and the citizens of Berlin. The CIA's monument is across the river at Langley, in Virginia.