After 'Goodbye Lenin', a Berlin resurrection

Buried and long forgotten, the head of a giant Lenin statue is set to make a comeback in the German capital a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Soviet leader will gaze again on the people when the 3.5 ton piece is resurrected from its current grave, a sandpit under a pile of rocks home to a colony of lizards.

The goateed head of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin, is to be unearthed, trucked across Berlin and displayed in a line-up of historical sculptures marking the end of an odyssey that started in the Cold War.

?Lenin was always set to be part of the exhibition because it?s a special statue, given its size alone,? said Andrea Theissen, curator of the Citadel Spandau hosting the exhibition from September.

A similarly oversized bust of Lenin starred in the award-winning 2003 comedy-drama ?Good Bye Lenin!,? showing the Russian revolutionary leader suspended from a helicopter, unceremoniously carted over the roofs of a reunited Berlin.

 That scene never actually took place, but the real-life journey of the statue has been no less dramatic.
Once upon a time, the 1.7 meter (five feet) high head was part of a Lenin statue carved from Ukrainian pink granite that towered 19 meters (62 feet) above East Berlin, framed by Soviet pre-fab apartment tower blocks.

It was designed by Nikolai Tomsky, then president of the Soviet Academy of Arts, and its massive stone blocks were hauled to the socialist brother-state in a convoy of trucks.

The statue was inaugurated before 200,000 people on April 19, 1970, three days before the 100th anniversary of Lenin?s birth, and stayed there for 31 years, dominating a square named after the Bolshevik revolutionary.

After a wave of people power...