20 years on from the fall of the wall

Source: Nick Fewings en Unsplash

Berlin marks 20 years since the fall of the wall

Tens of thousands of people, including dissidents, songwriters, priests and political leaders who helped to engineer the collapse of communism in the former eastern bloc, braved a cold, persistent drizzle today to mark 20 years since the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war.

Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, retraced the first steps she and tens of thousands of other east Germans made to the west 20 years ago, as celebrations across Europe included memorial services, candlelit vigils and – the highlight of the day – a scheduled toppling of 1,000 giant dominoes along an almost one-mile stretch of the wall's route.

Crowds who thronged the graffiti-covered iron bridge at Bornholmer Strasse in northeast Berlin, some of them hanging from its girders, shouted “Gorby! Gorby!” as they had on Nov. 9, 1989, in recognition of the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev was there on Monday, accompanied by Lech Walesa, the former leader of the Solidarity opposition movement in Poland, and then Polish president, both of them now somewhat shrunken figures dressed in black felt caps against the cold. Yet they clearly enjoyed basking in the limelight once again as they stopped to sign autographs and chat with the crowds.

The onlookers, some of whom clutched photographs of themselves celebrating on that heady November night that changed the world, chanted “Wir sind das Volk!” (We are one people) — an expression that became the slogan of the opposition movement as they urged the East German government to reform in the months leading up to the fall of the wall.

The first people to cross then recalled the fear they had felt even after they had been told they had permission to leave.

“It was completely dark, and my first reaction was to want to turn round and go back to the east,” said Annemarie Reiffert, who was the very first east German to cross the border into the west with her daughter.

“But then my curiosity got the better of me, and I thought, ‘If they let us out, they’ll let us back in,’” she said.

“It’s perhaps as chaotic as it was in 1989,” said Merkel, who spent her childhood in East Germany and who on that night left her two-room flat on nearby Schonhauser Allee to cross the bridge, and then searched in vain for a telephone box to call her aunt in Hamburg.

She urged Germans not to forget “how many couldn’t travel, how many were imprisoned, how many children were victimized ... the many lost opportunities.”

Leaders from Europe, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, later gathered at the Brandenburg Gate for a concert by the conductor Daniel Barenboim and his Staatskapelle orchestra, and the opera singer Placido Domingo.

Barenboim said the concert, with works by Beethoven, Wagner and Schonberg, was meant to reflect the full weight of Nov. 9, which stood for both joy and suffering in German history.

On that day in 1938, synagogues and Jewish property were destroyed by Nazi forces in what became known as Kristallnacht. It is also the day, in 1925, when the SS was founded, when the Munich beer hall putsch took place in 1923, the day the German monarchy ended in 1918, and the day the German revolution failed in 1848.

“It's strange that the bell of the 9th November has rung so often in German history, even for someone like me, who’s not a superstitious person,” Barenboim said.

Source: The Guardian 

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