Germany marks anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall

BERLIN — Christian Heinz spent his childhood happily behind the Berlin Wall. Born in 1962 on the western side of the 12-foot-high concrete barrier, talk of the wall that stood at the end of his street brings back fond memories of playing soccer with other neighborhood boys with it as the goal post.
"It wasn't something to be afraid of," said Heinz. "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, 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 and secret service police going up and down. My father was in Sweden, and I couldn't visit him."
Berliners like Satti and Heinz are taking time to reflect on their different experiences this year 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.
And to celebrate a day that marked a turning point in the country's postwar history.
Berlin has commissioned an light instillation by German artists Christopher and Marc Bauder that includes 8,000 illuminated balloons strung along the approximately 90-mile wall and other fortifications that encircled the western half of the city from 1961 to 1989 until communist East Germany collapsed in the twilight of the Cold War.
On Sunday, thousands visited the landmarks of former East Berlin, placed flowers in the cracks of parts of the wall, and filled the streets around Brandenburg Gate. 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.
For decades, the wall, built by East German officials allied with the Soviet Union, stopped a flood of East Germans from going to the West. Built in the 1950s, the wall was shored up over the year while East Germans brutally punished those who tried to escape the country. More than 136 people were killed or died while 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 1989Two 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 still 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.
A Soviet-allied government that followed communist ideology and suffered economic failure ruled the East, while the West, allied with the United States, enjoyed democracy and a flourishing economy.
Today, unemployment in the former East Germany is 9.7%, or 4.3% higher than the West. Frankfurt is one of the world's great financial centers. Bavaria's auto industry is second to none. Businesses in the former east, on the other hand, are relatively unproductive in comparison.
Communism left its mark politically on the East, too. The Left Party — the successor of Honecker's Socialist Unity Party — retains supports in the region, said Verheyen.