BERLIN—Massive colorful dominoes painted by German students have been placed along the former path of the Berlin Wall to mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of the barrier that divided the city and the country for nearly three decades.
Many of the upright 2.3-meter-high (7.5-foot-high) plastic foam dominoes carried messages, including “We are one people.” The approximately 1,000 dominoes stretching for 1.5 kilometers will be toppled on Monday as part of wider celebrations of the wall’s fall.
One labeled “bleeding heart” showed a sword cutting through the city of Berlin, starting a crimson flow of blood speckled with crosses.
“Everyone has walls in their heads to a certain extent,” Berlin resident Stefan Schueler said as he perused the domino display. “It’s always a good thing if one can break them down, and I think this is a good symbol.”
In recent weeks, polls have been released on the differences, and as often as not, the similarities, between the former East and West Germany in matters of love and real estate, table manners and car ownership.
Beneath the trivial differences lies a country more together than anyone expected.
Dark history
Former Polish leader Lech Walesa, whose pro-democracy movement Solidarity played a key role in ending communism in Eastern Europe, is to tip the first domino on Monday as the artistic display comes toppling down.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Russian President Dimitry Medvedev also are expected to be on hand for the formal commemorations of the wall’s opening on Nov. 9, 1989.
Especially among the young, there is the sense that the aspiration to transcend Germany’s dark history and simply become normal may finally be within reach.
“For people from our generation, it’s just a part of German history,” said Sebastian Melchior, 19, a student at the Alexander von Humboldt High School in the former East Germany. “For us this division doesn’t really exist anymore.”
The latest round of news media accounts on the tumultuous final hours of the wall have emphasized not some sense of historical inevitability driven by economics and geopolitics, but rather the capricious human side of the event.
Bureaucratic confusion
Bureaucratic confusion over new travel regulations led crowds of East Berliners to gather at border checkpoints on that November night 20 years ago, prompting guards to open the gates and bringing a sudden end to the division of the city with a night of spontaneous celebration and reunion.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, herself a resident of East Germany when the wall fell, said in her weekly podcast on Saturday that it was a day that “changed the lives of many people including me.”
“It is particularly nice for us to be able to celebrate this day with our European neighbors,” Merkel said. “We Germans will not forget our neighbors and allies who made the path to German reunification possible.”
Reunification costs
A new study shows that some 1.3 trillion euros (about $1.9 trillion) have been transferred from the west to rebuild the east, a newspaper reported.
The report by the Halle-based IWH research institute showed the net transfers from west to east—a sum equivalent to over half Germany’s total economic output in 2008—had “risen significantly” in the past decade, according to the weekly Welt am Sonntag.
The east has cast off many shackles from its communist past, thanks partly to the transfers, but unemployment remains nearly double that of the west and economists say it is still years away from catching up with the richer part of the country.
Researchers estimate that 136 people were killed while trying to cross the barrier during its 28-year existence.
