A statue of former President Ronald Reagan sits in the Capitol’s rotunda where visitors will find the smallest publicly accessible pieces of the Berlin Wall in D.C. A line of stones embedded just under the statue’s pedestal honors the man who demanded the demolition of Germany’s notorious monolith. 

“The Berlin Wall is that really rare thing where this edifice and its peaceful crumbling marked the change of an era,” Harrison says. “A revolution is one thing, but what can you touch and feel like you were part of it?”

Visitors to the Newseum gain the most perspective for how the armored partition imposed upon the Berlin landscape and emotional psyche. 

“When you look at this wall, it invites you to think about what a wall does,” Harrison says. “The decision to resort to such physical separation is an extreme one.”

The brooding bulk of a guard tower from near Checkpoint Charlie dominates the exhibit as an example of the more than 300 towers that East German soldiers used to monitor the boundary. The famous checkpoint, located in central Berlin, provided one of the few breaks in the line.

Additionally, eight sections—the longest stretch viewable outside Germany—separate the Newseum space and provoke a deep sense of division and isolation. 

The Smithsonian owns a small chunk of the wall, colored as though it needed to represent the vibrancy of freedom. Red, yellow, orange, green, and blue streaks of paint cover the triangular piece, about four inches across.

“For many Americans,” Harrison says, “it seemed to symbolize American victory in the Cold War, the victory of the West, of democracy and capitalism over Communism.”

A section of the wall, which ringed West Germany for nearly 100 miles, stands in the courtyard outside the JHU School of Advanced International Studies. The plaque notes that the slice of the international symbol for repression is “a reminder that freedom can never be taken for granted.”

This not-yet-finished museum, located at the U.S. Department of State, houses a recognizable artifact. Civic and political luminaries who ushered a relatively peaceful conclusion to the Cold War inscribed their names on the Signature Segment. The panel includes signatures from former President George H. W. Bush, former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and current German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the country’s first leader who grew up in Communist East Germany.

The wall offers “a permanent reminder of what unfree systems can impose when free systems fail to resist,” said Fred Kempe in 2014. Kempe is president of the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank based in D.C. that helped coordinate the acquisition of the Signature Segment.

Construction on the museum won’t be completed for another year or so. Until then, the best way to see the historical slab is to track the Facebook page for public events.

The Signature Segment now on view at the U.S. Diplomacy Center first spent a year as a temporary installation at the embassy. Now, anyone with official German business passes a different piece of the wall. Your best opportunity to see it comes during D.C.’s annual international staycation in May. 

“Interestingly,” Harrison says, “getting the Germans to pay attention to the positive history partly came from the outside, the global memory of the wall. The fall of the wall represented for most people this moment of joy, this terrible thing that people thought would never come down. It took the Germans a long time to realize that it’s a global icon for freedom.”