What happened 25 years ago?

Last weekend Berlin was divided again into two cities along 15 kilometers. The German artists Christopher and Marc Bauder set up 8,000 luminous white balloons along the border to commemorate 25 years since the Wall came down.

Below you can watch a video from this event called Lichtgrenze:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_KaG5T3bPw

Afterwards, these balloons were released with messages collected from the Internet to remember the newly-regained freedom and the end of the city’s division in 1989.

The whole city was celebrating the fall of the Wall during two days with numerous exhibitions, events, concerts and guided tours. The band Staatskapelle Berlin played “Ode an die Freude” by the Brandenburg Gate with Daniel Barenboim conducting the song. The Berlin Wall Memorial is hosting a new permanent exhibition as well as the open-air exhibition 100 Wall stories, which tells moving stories from the divided city, and both of the exhibitions are running well.

The 155 kilometres of the Wall that separated Berlin during almost 30 years were built in 1961 as the physical embodiment of the Cold War, to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West. On the 9th of November, 1989 something changed, not just for Germany but also for Europe and the whole world. The demolition of the Wall happened because of an accident. In a press conference, a former official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Günter Schabowski, announced facilities to travel out of East Germany with immediate effects. Then, hundreds of thousands of East Germans toppled the Wall and the border was opened.

The fall of the Wall concluded with the collapse of the communist bloc and the German unification one year later. But it is not the only historical event that is being remembered this year. In July the 100th anniversary of the World War was celebrated and 2014 is also the 75th
anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.

Isabel Barragán