Pieces of the Berlin Wall have travelled around the globe. (Shutterstock)

The Berlin Wall in chocolate Great walls around the world Images of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall is now more a mental construct than a physical one.

Torn down, pulverized or distributed around the world, it is now little more than the gravel beneath our highways, the artwork in our lunchrooms or the trinket brought home by tourists.

What was once the symbol of oppression and the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain is now a memory and a symbol of what a people can overcome through their own freedom of choice.

All that remains is a small cobblestone trail, two bricks wide, that runs the path of the original wall, encircling the old city of West Berlin. Drivers are reminded of the old border by a subtle thump-thump as they drive through now-major thoroughfares and shopping districts.

According to the government of Germany, there was an enormous sense of urgency to destroy the wall in 1989. Citizens and government agencies alike felt that if the wall were not destroyed, that the border could just as easily be closed again as left open. It was a symbol of a hurtful and

dangerous past that needed to be destroyed.

“Most of the wall had been pulverized into hundreds of thousands of tons of gravel for building roads to connect the two halves of the city,” reads the government’s website today.

A small group of historians fought from the beginning to have parts of the wall maintained. But by 1991, when they were finally taken seriously, only three portions of the wall remained, all of them badly damaged and neglected.

In 1995, a German senator saw the reconstruction in the city and remarked that soon all traces of that important stretch of history would be erased from the face of the earth.

“Quite soon nobody will believe that such a thing was put into the middle of a metropolis,” he said.

But the wall had no place in Berlin and was distributed around the world.

From 1990 onward, segments of the wall were sold at auction, given away as presents or hauled away as prizes of the Cold War.

Now, they can be found:

• In Simi Valley, California on the grounds of the Ronald Reagan presidential library

• In the men’s room of a Las Vegas casino, used as a mount for urinals

• In the lobby of a newspaper office in Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Mounted on the side of an office building at street level in New York City

• Outside the European Union parliament buildings in Brussels, Belgium

• Outside the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France

• Outside the World Peace Pavilion in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia

• In the Centre de Commerce Mondial in Montreal, Quebec

• In the interior gardens of Vatican City

• At the headquarters of the CIA

• Inside the cafeteria at Microsoft

To help celebrate 20 years after the fall of the wall, 1,000 foam dominoes 2.5 metres high will be designed by youth and placed in a line in front of the historic Brandenburg Gate "to raise awareness of walls around the world that continue to exist."

The Festival of Freedom will feature an open-air concert and public figures from around the world — even from pre-unified Germany — are expected to attend, including former German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and the Nobel Peace Laureates Kofi Annan, Muhammad Yunus and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Everything will culminate with the falling of the dominoes on Monday, Nov. 9 along a route nearly 2 kilometres long.