Sunday, November 9, 2014

Germany to mark 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall


The Berlin Wall had been built around West Berlin in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic – in their terminology, it was called it the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" and its main purpose was to prevent defections to the west.
However, on 9th November 1989, the first of the East Germans started to clamber across the divide into the west to bring to an end the great divide.
To commemorate the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall, German Chancellor Angela Merkel would release 8000 balloons along a nine-mile stretch of the former concrete frontier. The time has been set for 7.18pm local time, the moment when the first men crossed over from the East to the West.
The Berlin Wall had been there for 28-years from 1961 to 1989 and had come to be a potent symbol of the Cold War with its watchtowers and so-called "death-strip" where an estimated 5,000 people risked their lives to escape the hardline regime. Cracks started to appear as a result of bloodless revolutions in Poland and Hungary that heralded the loosening of communism's grip in Eastern Europe.
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gave momentum to the breakup by his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). The 83-year-old Gorbachev is expected to be in Berlin to join the commemoration ceremonies. While referring to the current standoff between the west and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, he has indicated that such signs could be harbinger of bad tidings like a new Cold War.
Among the programs is a concert at the Brandenburg Gate and the reopening of a museum dedicated to the Wall.

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