100k gather to celebrate the night Berlin Wall fell

THE fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, heralding the end to the Cold War between East and West, showed the world “dreams can come true” and should inspire people trapped in tyranny everywhere, Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday.
A visitor walks by East Side Gallery, a section of the former Berlin Wall, during celebrations. Picture: GettyA visitor walks by East Side Gallery, a section of the former Berlin Wall, during celebrations. Picture: Getty
A visitor walks by East Side Gallery, a section of the former Berlin Wall, during celebrations. Picture: Getty

Festivities to mark the anniversary have drawn more than 100,000 Berliners and tourists to the centre of the once-divided city. Many wandered along a nine-mile former “death strip” where the Wall once stood, and 7,000 illuminated helium balloons were perched 11.8 feet high on poles – matching the height of the barrier built in 1961 by Communist East Germany.

Mrs Merkel, a young scientist in Communist East Berlin when she got her first taste of freedom on 9 November, 1989, said in a speech that the Wall’s opening in response to mass popular pressure would be eternally remembered as a triumph of the human spirit.

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“The fall of the Berlin Wall showed us that dreams can come true – and that nothing has to stay the way it is, no matter how high the hurdles might seem to be,” said Mrs Merkel, who is now 60 and has led a united Germany since 2005.

“It showed that we have the power to shape our destiny and make things better,” she said, noting that people in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere around the world should feel heartened by the example of the wall’s sudden demise.

“It was a victory of freedom over bondage and it’s a message of faith for today’s, and future, generations that can tear down the walls – the walls of dictators, violence and ideologies.”

Germans, with few anniversaries to celebrate, have latched on to memories of the peaceful East German revolution as a bright, moment in their history.

But even the date 9 November is blighted, as Ms Merkel noted. It was also the day in 1938 of the anti-Jewish pogrom Kristallnacht, or “Night of Broken Glass”, when the Nazis carried out attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops across Germany.

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The artistic display of balloons, which dramatically illustrate how the wall cut through the heart of Berlin, is also porous to enable people to easily move back and forth between the former East and West Berlin.

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The balloons were due to be released last night – symbolically reenacting the wall’s collapse.

“We have every reason to celebrate,” Mayor Klaus Wowereit, whose city government has been rebuilding small segments of the wall for posterity and tourists after almost all of the original concrete barrier was hastily torn down over two decades ago.

“We were all happy at the time that it had fallen and [so it] was torn down,” he said.

The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to stop East Germans fleeing to the West. It began as a brick wall and was then fortified as a heavily guarded 100-mile double white concrete screen that encircled West Berlin, slicing across streets, between families, and through graveyards.

But despite the wall’s fall, German unity a year later and

€2 trillion pumped into the formerly Communist east of the country, there are still lingering east-west political, economic and social divisions in the city and country.

There is still an east-west income and wealth gap, and unemployment is nearly twice as high in the east.

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