Germany celebrates Berlin Wall memories

updated 6:55 p.m. ET Nov. 8, 2009

BERLIN - With concerts and memorials on Monday, Germans will celebrate the day the Berlin Wall came crashing down 20 years ago.

On that cold night, they danced atop the wall, arms raised in victory, hands clasped in friendship and giddy hope. Years of separation and anxiety melted into the unbelievable reality of freedom and a future without border guards, secret police, informers and rigid communist control.

Germans are celebrating with concerts boasting Beethoven and Bon Jovi; a memorial service for the 136 people killed trying to cross over from 1961 to 1989; candle lightings and 1,000 towering plastic foam dominoes to be placed along the wall's route and tipped over.

On Nov. 9, 1989, East Germans came in droves, riding their sputtering Trabants, motorcycles and rickety bicycles. Hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands crossed over the following days.

Stores in West Berlin stayed open late and banks gave out 100 Deutschemarks in "welcome money," then worth about $50, to each East German visitor.

Party lasted for four days
The party lasted four days and by Nov. 12 more than 3 million of East Germany's 16.6 million people had visited, nearly a third of them to West Berlin, the rest through gates opening up along the rest of the fenced, mined frontier that cut their country in two.

Sections of the nearly 155 kilometers (100 miles) of wall were pulled down and knocked over. Tourists chiseled off chunks to keep as souvenirs. Tearful families reunited. Bars gave out free drinks. Strangers kissed and toasted each other with champagne.

Klaus-Hubert Fugger, a student at the Free University in West Berlin, was having drinks at a pub when people began coming "who looked a bit different."

Customers bought the visitors round after round. By midnight, instead of going home, Fugger and three others took a taxi to the Brandenburg Gate, long a no man's land, and scaled the 12-foot (nearly four meter) wall with hundreds of others.

"There were really like a lot of scenes, like people crying, because they couldn't get the situation," said Fugger, now 43. "A lot of people came with bottles" of champagne and sweet German sparkling wine.

Fugger spent the next night on the wall, too. A newsmagazine photo shows him wrapped in a scarf.

"Then the wall was crowded all over, thousands of people, and you couldn't move ... you had to push through the masses of the people," he said.

‘To venture a new beginning’
Angela Merkel, Germany's first chancellor from the former communist East, recalled the euphoria in an address last week to the U.S. Congress.

"Where there was once only a dark wall, a door suddenly opened and we all walked through it: onto the streets, into the churches, across the borders," Merkel said. "Everyone was given the chance to build something new, to make a difference, to venture a new beginning."

The wall the communists built at the height of the Cold War and which stood for 28 years is mostly gone. Some parts still stand, at an outdoor art gallery or as part of an open-air museum. Its route through the city is now streets, shopping centers, apartment houses. The only reminder of it are a series of inlaid bricks that trace its path.

Checkpoint Charlie, the prefab that was long the symbol of the Allied presence and of Cold War tension, has been moved to a museum in western Berlin.

Potsdamer Platz, the vibrant square that was destroyed during World War II and became a no man's land during the Cold War, is full of upscale shops selling everything from iPods to grilled bratwursts.

At a ceremony in Berlin Oct. 31, Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who presided over the opening of the wall, stood side by side with the superpower presidents of the time, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.

After the decades of shame that followed the Nazi era, Kohl suggested, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of their country 11 months later gave Germans pride.

"We don't have many reasons in our history to be proud," said Kohl, now 79. But as chancellor, "I have nothing better, nothing to be more proud of, than German reunification."

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