On a Memory-Filled Date, the Fall of the Berlin Wall Stands Front and Center

BERLIN — If memory needs places, Berlin was the place this weekend to remember the horror of the Berlin Wall, and the joy of unexpected liberation that accompanied its fall 25 years ago Sunday.

With her customary decorum, Chancellor Angela Merkel led her country in celebrations flavored with the only-in-Germany mix of triumph and tragedy.

In a 20-minute speech at a new memorial to the tragedies wrought by the wall, Ms. Merkel noted the special meaning of Nov. 9 in German history. It was on that day, in 1918, that Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, “after four terrible years” of World War I. In 1923, it was the date of Hitler’s failed march on the Munich Festhalle. In 1938, she said, it was when the Nazis set fire to synagogues, plundered Jewish homes and businesses and detained and killed thousands of Jews — “the start of the killing of millions” in the catastrophe of the Holocaust.Only in 1989, after Europeans across the Soviet bloc were rising up against Communism, did Nov. 9 become a date of joy with the wall falling. Now, Ms. Merkel and many other speakers this weekend noted, it is up to Germans to nurture the memory, preserve democracy and intervene to prevent injustice.

Thousands of words were spoken as hundreds of thousands of visitors converged on Berlin and captured millions of moments in the digital universe that did not exist a quarter-century ago. Where words and images were insufficient, the genius of Bach and Beethoven was summoned to express feelings.

Dorothea Ebert, a violinist who spent time in an East German jail after an unsuccessful attempt to flee to the West in 1983, performed for the chancellor and about 100 guests at the opening of the memorial, playing Bach’s Allemande from the Partita in D minor for solo violin. Hours later, the conductor Daniel Barenboim lead the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Staatsoper choir in Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” at the Brandenburg Gate.

Earlier in the day, the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer presided over an event at the magnificent Konzerthaus at which musicians from any Berlin orchestras or choirs were invited to the concert hall to join in an unrehearsed rendering of the final scene of the second act of Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio.”

“There was no rehearsal for that night 25 years ago,” Mr. Fischer said. “So not today either.”

The Konzerthaus event, one of many citywide celebrations, drew a number of foreign dignitaries, including Lech Walesa, the founder of Poland’s Solidarity trade union; Miklos Nemeth, prime minister of Hungary when it opened the first hole in the Iron Curtain, allowing East Germans who were visiting Hungary to cross into Austria months before the wall fell; and the former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose glasnost and perestroika policies paved the way for the successful popular uprisings across the Soviet bloc in 1989.

Mr. Walesa and Mr. Nemeth were warmly welcomed by the 1,000 or so guests; Mr. Gorbachev received a standing ovation. The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz, a German, used the occasion to warn of the danger of rising nationalism in Europe, and of the need to create hope for the post-1989 generation of European youth, many of them are facing a hopeless quest for work.

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But it was, above all, a German event.

Ms. Merkel focused on Bernauer Strasse, the site in north Berlin where the wall literally ran through houses and people jumped to freedom from their windows as the wall went up on Aug. 13, 1961. It is now the site of an open-air memorial and museum that Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said would attract more than a million visitors this year.

After laying a yellow-and-red rose in memory of the 138 people killed trying to cross the wall — hundreds more died at the border that divided Germany itself — Ms. Merkel attended a brief religious service at which Berlin’s Lutheran bishop, Markus Dröge, extolled the “great and fragile gift of freedom.”

Christian Klopf, a local Berliner who helped start the drive for a memorial at the site, said that he passed it every day on a once-impossible journey from East to West. “And every day it is a great feeling,” he said.

Renate Fischer, another local resident, recalled how activists like herself at first just wanted to reform East Germany. “But then the impossible happened, and today it is routine,” she said.

Many of the East Germans who led the small but vocal dissident movement were prominent in this weekend’s celebrations. On Friday, Wolf Biermann, a singer who was stripped of his East German citizenship by the Communists in 1976, caused a stir when he used an appearance in the German Parliament to attack the Left Party, which consists partly of former Communists. When reminded that he had no right to make a speech, Mr. Biermann retorted that he was not going to be silenced now.

Indeed, he gave another concert for Ms. Merkel and hundreds of others on Saturday night. Some activists — including Roland Jahn, now the commissioner in charge of the huge archives of the Stasi, East Germany’s much-feared secret police — went on to other parties, thanking West German journalists for their help 25 years ago, and generally reveling in the satisfaction of success.

At the memorial opening Sunday, one former activist, Markus Meckel, 62, recalled how he returned home late on Nov. 9, 1989, in Magdeburg, and was astonished to learn that the wall had fallen. “For weeks, we had already had the feeling that we were going to succeed with democracy,” Mr. Meckel said. Only after that, he added, would they deal with the wall. “It was clear that you could not do one without the other,” he said. So when the wall tumbled in just a few hours, “I was just thinking: Things will get more complicated.”

How much more complicated has become clear this anniversary with the events in nearby Ukraine, a topic that hung over a brief meeting Ms. Merkel had with a few dozen former East Germans who visit schools and share their experiences, lest young people forget what dictatorship and democracy have meant over the past decades here.

Volker Wetzk, 46, drew the ire of East German officials in the spring of 1989 for refusing to say that he would obey the shoot-to-kill order when doing his mandatory service guarding the border with the West.

On Sunday, he gently admonished Chancellor Merkel for not saying more about Ukraine in her speech. She discussed the need to stick to diplomacy — just as the Americans, British and French had not risked military force to try to undo the division of Berlin, she noted.

Barbara Grosser, 67, another former East German who was jailed for trying to leave her country and eventually moved West, spoke of a widely shared reluctance about using force in any circumstances.

“If someone talks about using force, I am frightened,” she said. “They are highly well equipped and have fewer scruples than we do,” she added, alluding to Russian forces. “So I would really be afraid.”