German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Berlin Wall Memorial, which is displaying a commemorative exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of Wall. Rough Cut (no reporter narration). Video provided by Reuters Newslook
A visitor looks through a preserved segment of the Berlin Wall during the commemorations to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall at the Berlin Wall Memorial in the Bernauer Strasse on Sunday.(Photo: Tobias Schwarz, AFP/Getty Images)
BERLIN — The Berlin Wall brings back fond memories for Christian Heinz, who spent his childhood happily playing soccer with neighborhood boys using the 12-foot-high concrete barrier as a goal post.
"It wasn't something to be afraid of," Heinz, 53, said. "If you were lost, you could just go to the wall, take a left, and you'd be at the next bus or underground station. The separation of Germany wasn't my problem."
Rahman Satti, 49, lived a mile away from Heinz's childhood neighborhood in East Berlin, where the wall cast an oppressive shadow over daily life.
"It was a feeling of pessimism," Satti said. "You felt sorry for yourself that you couldn't climb over the wall, touch the wall or go over to the other side. When you left the house, there was a policeman there guarding the wall."
Berliners like Satti and Heinz are reflecting on their different experiences as their unified city — now capital of the world's third-largest economy and one of the most culturally vibrant cities in Europe — marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday.
Berlin commissioned a light instillation that includes 8,000 illuminated balloons strung along the 90-mile wall and other fortifications that encircled the western half of the city from 1961 to 1989, when communist East Germany collapsed in the twilight of the Cold War.
Thousands of illuminated balloons mark the path where the Berlin Wall once stood, as the city prepares to celebrate the 25th anniversary since it was torn down. Vanessa Johnston reports. Video provided by Reuters Newslook
On Sunday, thousands visited landmarks of former East Berlin, placing flowers in the cracks of parts of the wall and filling the streets around Brandenburg Gate, where many climbed the wall after the opening of the border was announced. They lit candles at memorials for victims, walked hand-and-hand, tracing the path of where the border once stood and read markers detailing its stories.
"My grandparents lived in West Berlin at that time and we used to come across the border," recalled Nicolas Plenge, 34, of Berlin. "That day, I remember my father thought it all wasn't real. This day is special — it changed the world."
Later Sunday, officials will release the balloons as the Berlin State Opera orchestra plays Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from his Symphony No. 9 to mark the euphoria that night when Germans broke the wall with hammers and chisels and celebrate a day that marked a turning point in the country's postwar history.
For decades, the wall — built in the 1950s by East German officials allied with the Soviet Union — stopped a flood of East Germans from going to the West. East Germans brutally punished those who tried to escape the country: More than 136 people were killed trying to cross into West Germany.
The wall's days became numbered in the late 1980s when then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other Eastern bloc countries to relax their relations with the West. Gorbachev's "Glasnost" (openness) eventually led East Germany to allow Czechs, Poles and others to emigrate to the West through its territory in September 1989.
Two months later, after East German dictator Erich Honecker was deposed and mass demonstrations by East Germans seeking the same freedoms as their neighbors were reaching a fever pitch, German Democratic Republic spokesman Günter Schabowski suggested during a press conference that the country's borders with Western Germany would be relaxed.
Schabowski's comments prompted sledgehammer-wielding citizens on both sides of the wall to begin dismantling the barrier. A year later, West Germany officially annexed the German Democratic Republic.
Today, a generation of post-unification Germans has reached adulthood. But Dirk Verheyen, a political scientist at Free University of Berlin, believes a lingering divide exists between East and West Germany.
"If you look at the 80 million Germans alive today, they came of age, experienced adulthood, during the time of division," Verheyen said. "The adult Germans who came of age during the Nazi period of WWII are declining, but it has only been 25 years since the fall of the wall. It isn't something that disappears overnight."
Many historians emphasize the importance of the "Mauer im Kopf," or the wall that formed in the minds of the East and West Germans owing to their starkly different experiences during the Cold War.
Felix Namuth, 49, from Hornburg in former West Germany remembers that night 25 years ago: He was listening to the radio when he heard the wall was coming down.
"I jumped in the car and I came to Berlin alone," he said of Nov. 9. 1989. "I knew that it was the end of East Germany."
After the wall came down, Heinz found he had a lot in common with Easterners.
"Afterward, we saw that the differences between us and the East Germans were not so great," Heinz said. "The Berliners are all the same. They have a beer and a currywurst (sausage) and see what happens next."
Contributing: Luigi Serenelli in Berlin.
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