The record
Forty-three segments standing in a Silesian meadow — the largest private collection anywhere, begun with six bought for a 7,000 mark donation.
In the spring of 1990 a gold-painted Trabant could be seen chugging across a meadow in the Silesian village of Sosnówka, wedged between pieces of the Berlin Wall. It was the first work of Ludwik Wasecki, a Berlin dentist and art collector who had found an artistic vocation in the events of the previous November. A second installation followed, in which a giant aluminium fork punched through a wall rebuilt in wood and papier mâché, its tines driven into a plain wooden table. He called it Wolfshunger, after the stamped aluminium cutlery he remembered from East Berlin in the 1970s, where he met his parents and friends after leaving Poland in 1972 and emigrating to Sweden.
A Berlin newspaper editor noticed the work in 1990 and Wasecki was put in touch with Rainer Hildebrandt of the Mauermuseum at Checkpoint Charlie, who wanted to show the installations on the museum roof and suggested adding original segments. Wasecki could not afford the going rate of tens of thousands of marks apiece, so Hildebrandt arranged it: in October 1990 Wasecki was allowed to pick six segments from the dismantled stock held for sale, and against a donation of 7,000 marks had them loaded onto a low-loader and driven to Sosnówka. Through the museum's contacts with Hagen Koch — the former border soldier and Stasi officer whom the GDR government had appointed special commissioner for dismantling the border in the spring of 1990 — more followed.
Among them are eight brightly painted segments sold at the first great Monaco auction in June 1990 and never collected. One, blue with an orange woman's head, had been knocked down to Japanese buyers for 40,000 marks before they changed their minds. It stands in the meadow today with forty-two others, alongside work by Kiddy Citny, Keith Haring and Thierry Noir — Noir came to Sosnówka himself to put his heads on segments that had never been painted, and repainted Wasecki's bathroom and barn while he was there. Wasecki kept building: an oversized coffee grinder crushing lumps of wall, huge red boxing gloves strung between the slabs for the piece he called the Knockout, wooden stick figures walking towards a grey segment in a work named for the search for the way out.
The collection has been shown — at the Wrocław architecture museum in October 1992, again on the Wrocław market square seven years later, and in Germany in 1991 for the thirtieth anniversary of Hildebrandt's museum — and one piece, an enormous drill uncomfortably reminiscent of dental equipment, has stood since the summer of 2009 beside the theatre in Gniezno. The rest sits largely undisturbed on private land in a village few people find. No other private owner in this catalogue holds anything like forty-three standing segments, and almost nobody sees them.
How did it get here?
Six segments chosen from the dismantled stock in October 1990 against a 7,000 mark donation, arranged by Rainer Hildebrandt of the Mauermuseum; more acquired afterwards through the museum's contacts with Hagen Koch, including eight painted segments sold at the June 1990 Monaco auction and never collected by their buyers.
Sources & verification
Berlin Wall Archive ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Source accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 397
Source-reported segments: 50. This is not a separately verified count.
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide, site entry ↗
Ludwik Wasecki's biography and installations, the 1990 gold Trabant and Wolfshunger works, Rainer Hildebrandt's intervention, the six segments for a 7,000 mark donation in October 1990, the Hagen Koch contacts, the eight uncollected Monaco auction segments including the one sold to Japanese buyers for 40,000 marks, the 43 segments now on the meadow, the works by Citny, Haring and Noir, the 1992 and 1999 Wrocław exhibitions, and the drill installed beside the theatre in Gniezno in 2009.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
Last verified: Not yet verified
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