THE Berlin Wall, once the hated symbol of a divided Europe, is being rebuilt in the centre of the German capital, drawing cries of outrage from those who remember the trigger-happy guards and snarling dogs that patrolled its perimeters.

Only about 200 yards of concrete is going up — and there are no plans to lay minefields — but the plan has provoked a fierce debate among Berliners about the limits of remembrance.

Alexandra Hildebrandt, who is heading the project, knew that her idea would be controversial. One in four Germans recently told opinion pollsters that they favoured a new Berlin Wall — easterners who fear that they are becoming victims of labour-market reforms, and westerners who are fed up with paying subsidies to the East — yet nobody seriously expected the Wall to come back.

Frau Hildebrandt’s aim is to ensure that the brutality of the Communist regime is not forgotten, and to stop the Wall being wiped from memory.

“For the young, the Berlin Wall is virtually forgotten,” she said. “We are essentially creating a freedom memorial on a piece of land that was little more than a rubbish dump. I don’t see the problem.”

Frau Hildebrandt runs the Checkpoint Charlie museum, near the former East-West crossing point, which chronicles the many daring escape attempts and the blood spilt. Her goal is to emphasise the heroism of those who tried to cross the Wall and the guilt of those who tried to stop them.

The cranes were putting the big concrete blocks into place yesterday. The Wall should be ready by the end of this week.

“It’s a very strange feeling,” Wolfgang Müller, 53, a plasterer from Pankow in what used to be East Berlin, said as he carefully smoothed cement on to the blocks. “I never thought I would be building the Berlin Wall again.”

For Walter Momper, a Social Democrat and former Mayor of Berlin, the new Wall is an affront. “You cannot make a tourist attraction out of an instrument of murder,” he said.

Other politicians describe the reconstructed Wall as “not helpful” or as “a trivialisation of history — pure Disneyland”. A scornful editorial in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper described it as a “wall of lies”.

The city council will allow the Wall to be built only as a “temporary art exhibit”.

Frau Hildebrandt’s commission runs out at the end of the year. “If necessary we will buy the land in order to make it permanent,” she said.Two segments of the original Berlin Wall are on display. One, known as East Side Gallery, is covered in graffiti, some painted by well-established artists. Tourists are led to believe that this was the East-West frontier. In fact it was an internal barrier to stop East Berliners approaching the real, more dangerous border. Another stretch of the original Wall is in Bernauerstrasse, but it has been enclosed and forms part of a museum exhibition.

The Berlin Wall was ripped apart in 1989 and 1990. Painted fragments are still on sale as souvenirs — though of dubious authenticity — and crosses mark points where would-be defectors were shot dead.

But the political need to blur East-West differences in the 1990s prompted a collective forgetting about the reality of the Wall. In some places where a street was once divided, the “death strip” lamps are now used as street lights.

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

• The Wall was a Cold War symbol from 1961 to 1989
• In 1975 the Wall was reinforced with 45,000 concrete sections. Crossing points were Alpha, Bravo and Checkpoint Charlie
• In 1987 Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate
• Two years later, mass demonstrations against the East German Government culminated in free access to the West, symbolising the end of the Cold War
• West and East Germany were unified on October 3, 1990

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