File photo shows Scaffolders working on the East German parliament building's "hammer and compasses" sign...

File photo shows Scaffolders working on the East German parliament building's "hammer and compasses" sign in the East Berlin June 5, 1990. The end is nigh for Berlin's most famous eyesore, a colossus of concrete and steel which once housed East Germany's Communist government and now stands derelict on the city's main tourist drag. Demolition of the Palace of the Republic is set for December to the dismay of eastern Germans nostalgic for its socialist heyday and a legion of artists and beatniks who have used the ruin's vast spaces in recent years to provoke and entertain. Now the graffiti-daubed building, whose fate stirs lingering divisions between eastern and western Germans, made manifest in the recent election, is taking leave of the city with one last defiant gesture -- an exhibition about death.