Wall anniversary celebrations kick off
Published: 8 Nov 09 13:19 CET
Berlin warmed up Sunday for the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall with celebrations throughout the city, as crowds gathered to relive the ecstatic scenes that heralded the demise of European communism.
Leaders from across the continent were due in the German capital to join around 100,000 revellers Monday at the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of national unity since the peaceful revolution that tore down the Wall in 1989.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was flying to Berlin to give a speech late Sunday on the challenges facing the West two decades after the Cold War.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who will also host leaders including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, recalled that the end of Europe’s postwar division came as an utter surprise.
“The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall should remind us all what incredible luck we had with the reunification of Europe and Germany,” Merkel, who grew up in communist East Germany, told the Bild newspaper in an interview to be published Monday.
On the night of November 9, 1989, following weeks of pro-democracy protests, the Stalinist state’s authorities suddenly opened the border.
After 28 years as prisoners of their own country, euphoric East Germans streamed to checkpoints and rushed past bewildered guards, many falling tearfully into the arms of West Germans welcoming them on the other side.
On Sunday, Germans were already out in force along the former route of the barrier which had cleaved the city in half, inspecting 1,000 giant dominos that will be toppled as part of Monday’s ceremony.
Mayor Klaus Wowereit said the project, in which schoolchildren were among those to decorate the huge foam tiles, had helped underline the day’s importance for those too young to remember it.
“History is palpable and alive here,” he said. “The peaceful revolution of the fall of the Wall 20 years ago paved the way to an unprecedented transformation of Berlin.”
In the Wall Park in the eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg, Berliners were to form a chain of handkerchiefs along the former border decorated with slogans and scenes linked to the Wall.
“Handkerchiefs are a symbol of the many tears, the farewells, the joy, the dance, the exchange between East and West,” said organiser Bernd Klippel. In the run-up to the anniversary, Irish rockers U2 electrified a crowd of 10,000 at the Brandenburg Gate Thursday with a spectacular free concert that included the ballad “One”, written in Berlin and partly inspired by the Wall’s fall.
On Friday, artists unveiled restored murals on the longest-surviving stretch of the 155-kilometer-long (96-mile-long) Wall. Known as the East Side Gallery, the paintings were completed in 1990 and are now one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions.
France was also preparing a big celebration Monday, which minister for Europe Pierre Lellouche called a gesture to make amends for misgivings about German reunification at the time the Wall fell.
A dazzling light-and-sound show will take place on the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, inspired by the impromptu concert given by Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at Checkpoint Charlie two days after the Wall tumbled.
“I wanted to organise a celebration in Paris to chase away, once and for all, the fears that surrounded this period,” Lellouche told Sunday’s Le Parisien newspaper.
Trading magic for the beauty of being ordinary
Published: 8 Nov 09 21:23 CET
Forget the magic of history and Helmut Kohl’s illusory “blossoming landscapes” – 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall eastern Germany has become a beautifully ordinary place, writes The Local’s Marc Young.
It’s easy to overlook how beautiful the mundane can be when remembering the magically historic events of November 9, 1989.
But this weekend I took a short train ride from Berlin to the eastern German state of Saxony that would have been impossible 20 years ago.
My trip took me through pleasant countryside on a golden autumn afternoon, but it wasn’t exactly the “blossoming landscapes” that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl so infamously promised amid the euphoria of German reunification.
In 2009, many of the eastern towns and villages I passed through face serious socioeconomic problems including high unemployment and a dramatic demographic decline. But even a superficial glance out the train window confirmed the eastern half of Germany is still light-years from where it was on that night in November when the Wall crumbled.
With its modern infrastructure, rebuilt cities and environment unpoisoned by industrial filth, the region is no longer condemned to become Germany’s Mezzogiorno. It’s undoubtedly taken a huge effort and an equally large amount of cash, but nobody (aside from Kohl) said undoing 40 years of communist economic mismanagement would happen overnight.
A study released last week by Cologne’s IW economic institute even forecast the most prosperous parts of the East are likely to overtake the poorest bits of the West over the next few years.
But what about those sceptics arguing there’s still a mental wall diving Germans decades after the barbed wire and concrete disappeared?
Differences certainly remain between Ossis and Wessis, but the gulf that separates them in 2009 is in many ways no greater than the one between people from northern and southern Germany.
Those who would deny an Ossi identity conveniently overlook the fact that Germany has always been a place of strong regional variety – just put someone from Hamburg in a room full of Bavarians to see what I mean.
Far more important is that Teutons of all shapes and sizes are anchored at the heart of a democratic and peaceful continent. Without German reunification, the eastward expansion of the European Union would be unthinkable.
Nor would I have likely attended the birthday party of a spritely 80-year-old lady in Saxony this weekend. She’s lived through war and fascism, oppression and communism, as well as the upheaval of 1989’s peaceful revolution. There was cake, plenty of beer, and a small-time magician, who conjured a ridiculously large white rabbit from thin air.
Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the magic of November 9 has inexorably faded. But eastern Germany has become a gloriously normal place in the meantime.
Marc Young (marc.young@thelocal.de)
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