Today is a day of celebration in Germany: the day the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago. On November 9, 1989, East Germans were finally free and began to cross into what was then West Germany. The whole country was almost unable to believe what was happening. And that is what Germans celebrate today and maybe for a few hours in the spirit of the celebrations will try to forget that things did not go as well as in the euphoria of the moment they had expected. Even Angela Merkel, has acknowledged that much still needs to be done to ensure equal living conditions in the East and West.
Nevertheless in Berlin the celebrations had begun. There will be concerts, a memorial service for the 136 people who were killed trying to cross over from 1961 to 1989, candle lights and 1,000 foam dominoes to be placed along what had been the wall’s route to be tipped over. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor who is the first German leader to have grown up in the communist East has invited the leaders of all 27 European Union countries and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The United States will be represented by Hillary Clinton.
Around 6pm, the famous conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim will conduct the Staats Kapelle orchestra on an outdoor stage at the Brandenburg Gate. Then from 6.30pm world leaders including Merkel, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and Dimitry Medvedev will give speeches. Afterwards, the dominoes will be toppled. Former Polish President Lech Walesa will push the first domino, symbolically reenacting the toppling of communism across Eastern Europe. He will be joined by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh, former South African President Nelson Mandela and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who was one of the leaders of 1989’s Velvet Revolution. Finally about 8pm there will be fireworks at the Brandenburg Gate.
As all the festivities go on in Berlin, the west part of the country while happy to have been united, has a certain reluctance to celebrate which is partly due to the financial strain of taking over the almost bankrupt German Democratic Republic. Something that many western Germans believe has held back the west.
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