World leaders are due to join thousands of people to mark 20 years since the Berlin Wall’s fall, an event that paved the way for the end of the Cold War.
The main celebrations in the city will be at the Brandenburg Gate – the symbol of German reunification in 1990.
Giant dominoes will be toppled to show how Communist governments in Eastern Europe fell one after another in 1989.
Communist East Germany erected the 155km (96-mile) concrete Wall in 1961 to encircle West Berlin.
It was put up to prevent East Germans from fleeing into the capitalist enclave.
More than 100 people are believed to have been killed at the Wall while trying to escape.
The wall in 1989 during the protests
Quote from that day :
Wednesday 8 November 1989 – East German cabinet quits
The East German government yesterday yielded to pressure from vast demonstrations and the rapid haemorrhage of its young people, and resigned to make way for change.
Shortly afterwards the Communist Party’s Politburo – the real organ of power – gathered to decide on its own fate, while outside hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were chanting: “All power to the people, not to the party!”
Egon Krenz, the country’s new leader, announced recently that five more of the 21-strong Politburo had asked to go, in the wake of the three – including his predecessor, Erich Honecker – who have already resigned. But as the lights burned late in the stern grey building in the city centre, expectations rose that they would all go soon.
Tomorrow night, at the climax of the biggest official party seen in Europe, with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, hosting Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president — to name but a few — the slabs will crash into one another like dominos, representing the chain of events that 20 years ago brought the cold war to an end.
The first “domino” will be pushed over, fittingly enough, by Lech Walesa and Miklos Nemeth, the veteran Polish and Hungarian anti-communist campaigners. They will be joined by two other main actors in the drama of 1989: the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the then West German foreign minister.
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September 17th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
A mystery bidder has purchased a piece of history in the form of ‘Checkpoint Bravo’ – the once busy crossing points between East and West Berlin.
The site, in the south west in the city, is less famous than its central Berlin counterpart, Checkpoint Charlie but was snapped up by a sole bidder at auction.
The land, which includes a derelict bridge and a crumbling cafe covered in graffiti, sold for the minimum asking price of 45,000 euros (£37,600).
Checkpoint Bravo was built along a major motorway to inspect travellers between the Allied and Soviet sectors in the early 1950s.
It continued to be used to control movements from West Berlin into the Communist German Democratic Republic and from the East into the West.
The road was then re-routed and the checkpoint moved to a site a short distance away.
Millions of people travelled through Checkpoint Bravo, either West Germans travelling from West Berlin to the rest of West Germany through the GDR, or the lucky few East Germans given permission by the authorities to leave.
October 4th, 2010 at 1:18 am
Twenty years after the reunification of West Germany and the communist East Germany, the anxieties expressed then about a new German domination of Europe have proved unfounded. Even so, Germany is no longer afraid to assert its own national interests.
At a stroke on 3 October 1990, German reunification transformed Europe’s geopolitical landscape, less than a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
For many people, there seemed to be much to celebrate. Communism in Europe was dead. Eastern Europe was free from the Soviet yoke. The Cold War was declared over.
But there was also apprehension in some places that the nation which had unleashed the Nazi tyranny on most of Europe in World War II was once again united, with by far the largest population in Europe.
The old order, dominated by the victor nations from the war, was crumbling. Britain’s then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, voiced the fear that an “over-mighty” Germany would again destabilise Europe.
But over time Germany allayed such anxieties. The assurance repeated often by Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of German unity, was that German reunification and European integration should advance together as two sides of the same coin.
That persuasive formula became the new orthodoxy for Europe as a whole. So from the start Germany was at the very heart of the European “project” of ever-deeper integration, involving the countries of Western and Eastern Europe alike.