already filled with sandbags, Soviet flags and Russian fur hut sellers -- is becoming a kind of kitsch theme park and have condemned the new wall as a crass money spinner. One of the most potent symbols of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was built by communist East Germany in 1961 to stop a growing exodus to the West. But thousands still escaped past the cement and barbed wire barrier that surrounded West Berlin. Little remains of the 155-km (96-mile) wall in the centre of the city. In the jubilant early days of German reunification in 1990, many East Berliners were eager to remove all trace of the barrier which had kept them prisoner for nearly three decades. Those who manage the few intact sections of the wall see the replica as a simplification and distortion of reality. "Checkpoint Charlie ... doesn't represent the wall which kept people in," said Maria Nooke, who runs a visitor centre at Berlin's Bernauer Strasse, where many people lost their lives trying to cross the wall, some by jumping from house windows. "It suggests that the border was just a wall you could go up to and paint, but it was a whole system backed by a political regime which allowed soldiers the right to shoot those trying to escape," she said. --SP 1851 Local Time 1551 GMT
