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.
