Demolished 25 years ago, the Berlin Wall legend lives on

When the Berlin Wall fell - 25 years ago to the day, on November 9, 1989 - the world celebrated the demise of a loathed fortification that, since 1961, had divided the German city with barbed wire, watchtowers, snarling dogs and shoot-to-kill orders. Extending 155 kilometres, the wall divided families and provided a stark face to the miseries of the cold war.

Once the dust had settled, more than 40,000 segments of the wall were unceremoniously crushed to make materials for roads. The hated landmark, however, has left a profound and lasting impression, most notably on the popular imagination. Today the legacy of the wall and the cold war which ended when it came down lives on in novels, movies and music.

In literature, John Le Carré (who, under his real name David Cornwell, had worked for the British foreign intelligence service in Berlin) wrote his third book, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published in 1963, in the divided city. It became his first bestseller and set Le Carré on his way to becoming the world's pre-eminent purveyor of spy fiction.

In 1965, a film version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was released starring Richard Burton as British spy Alec Leamas - but the wall and its aura of menace and foreboding upstaged the movie.

"When I saw the Berlin Wall going up - I was there to flesh out our station in Berlin - when I conceived The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which I wrote in five weeks, I was determined that he would be killed at the wall," Le Carre later said of his morally ambiguous anti-hero Leamas.

Alfred Hitchcock also drew from the wall in Torn Curtain (1966) starring Paul Newman. In 1987, German filmmaker Wim Wenders' fantastical Der Himmel Über Berlin (literally The Sky Over Berlin, or Heaven Above Berlin, but released internationally under the title Wings of Desire) follows two angels as they listen in on the troubled souls of the carved-up metropolis.