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Fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years on: A day of joy, reflection
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People walk past a portrait of US singer Lou Reed painted on a section of the Berlin Wall, as part of the exhibition 'Art Liberty - From the Berlin Wall to the Street Art', in the south-central Bulgarian town of Plovdiv on January 12, 2019. (AFP/Dimitar Dilkoff)
T
he ninth of November is an iconic date for the German people: On this day, 10 years ago, the infamous Berlin Wall was brought down by people’s power, and the way to the reunification of Germany was opened.
After 40 years of bitter division, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain were reunited, and those who had been deprived of freedom and democracy under Communist rule were finally liberated.
It was a day of great and pure joy. We, who saw these events unfolding, will never forget the magic moments, when our fellow countrymen from the Eastern part of Berlin freely and happily crossed the brutal border, which had been closed for so long, and which, over decades, had seen the violent deaths of so many people trying to cross it in vain.
We all witnessed that the will of the people finally prevailed over tyranny, without a shot fired and without a life lost. What we experienced was rightly and justly called a historic miracle and a completely peaceful revolution.
Credit for the peaceful revolution goes, of course, first and foremost to our fellow countrymen in East Germany. It was their thirst for freedom, their courage and tenacity, and also the strictly nonviolent nature of their protests that brought down the Wall.
But credit also goes to our neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe, to the Hungarian, the Polish, the Czech and Slovak peoples, whose ardent desire for freedom had changed the very fabric of what once was a Soviet-dominated bloc of dictatorships.
Had it not been for Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II, Vaclav Havel and so many other courageous heralds of liberation, we would never have seen the surge of people power in Germany. Their names stand for many who not only felt the “winds of change” blowing but who actually brought about that change.
