Mauer fooled – The Big Berlin Wall Anniversary Let-Down
In November last year, Berlin celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, the fence that separated the city and Eastern from Western Europe for almost thirty years. I was going to the German capital at that time and felt really lucky for the coincidence. Before I left, my family and friends sent me recommendations on where to go and what to do on the d-day, as well as documentaries on the Cold War and the Mauer fall, which got me really excited to be there for such an historical event. The ‘Festival of Freedom’ was to be held around the Brandenburg gate, one of Berlin’s most symbolic spot, where world leaders and guests would gather to see 1,000 dominos representing the old wall being knocked down at 9pm.
A few hours before the celebrations started, I went to the Brandenburg gate to see how things were getting prepared. Once out of the Brandenburger Tor station, I was stricken by the number of policemen, police cars, and ironically; gates. The square was full of Media tents and coffee stands. The Paritzer platz is one of the top sites for tourists in Berlin, but that day none of the visitors could go near the Brandenburg gate, and we were gently invited by police officers to take a detour if we wanted to access the domino wall.
I decided to check out the main street, Eberstrasse. To get there I took a short cut through the Holocaust Memorial; a chilling piece of Art all in concrete, that looks like a hill of identical grey rectangles that transform into an underground labyrinth once inside. On the other side I was stopped by another security barrier. Behind it, on the exact place where the wall stood twenty years ago were the dominos. So nothing very outlandish up to that point. Passers-by were slowly walking beside the gate, reading the description boards as if they were in a museum. I followed them hazily, rocked by the trashy nineties dance music that blabbed from the speakers. The pavement was bursting with shops and food stalls. It felt like we were walking through a winter market or a fair more than anything. At the south end of the street on Potsdamer Platz, I saw a little part of the original wall, barricaded in the same fashion.
“The sight of Bon Jovi waddling in an empty square in front of Sarkozy, Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev and a totally still crowd was as odd as it was ridiculous…”
At 8.30 pm we came back to Potsdamer Platz. As expected the tube was packed and so was the square, but we managed to make our way next to the first domino. I could see tiny silhouettes of people in the all-glass buildings that surrounded the area. Fortunately for us big screens had been put up. The first thing I saw was Gordon Brown giving a speech. Watching the ceremony on a giant television made it difficult to realise that all these Western world leaders were actually 500 meters from us, and seemed to have numbed the crowd a bit. We all listened quietly to the British Prime Minister thanking the people of Berlin for having opened a new chapter in human history. Then came Hilary Clinton’s discourse, accompanied by a pre-recorded message from Barack Obama, followed by Angela Merkel’s speech, which would have been the most interesting if I had understood it, knowing that the Chancellor was born in East Germany. The fact that the whole ceremony was not subtitled made it even more difficult to feel personally concerned by what was going on. It was frustrating not being able to understand a word when Lech Walesa (former head of the Polish Solidarity movement and a key figure in the collapse of Soviet states in 1989) spoke. There were a great amount – if not a majority – of young foreigners in the audience, many British, French, Americans, but also Spanish and Italians, who seemed to share my slight disappointment.
The ceremony lasted a couple of hours, swaying between official event, documentary and some kitsch TV show. Two concerts took place in front of the Brandenburg gate; a German classical choir, followed by Jon Bon Jovi with a performance of his new single. So what exactly was the link between Bon Jovi and the reunification of Europe? Apparently he signed the wall twenty years ago, but so did a million of people, and that did not give them credit to come and sing in front on the Paritzer platz. The sight of the American singer waddling in an empty square in front of Sarkozy, Merkel, Mikhail Gorbachev and a totally still crowd was as odd as it was ridiculous. Finally the longest row of dominoes was pushed, and cameras followed their arduous fall before the fire works. Fifty minutes later, the show was over and the main street was empty. Some stayed next to the gates, waiting for something else to happen.
I expected to attend an historical event, but the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall was so scripted that it resulted in a sterile and impersonal television moment. It was amazing to be there for the symbolism of it and to gather with people of so many origins, especially people from Eastern Europe, which could not have been possible twenty years ago. But I wanted it to be held by the Berlin people, or at least organised by the city but in a more spontaneous and lively way. In the end it was so tightly controlled that it was hard to feel anything. It’s possible that I wasn’t in the best bit of the crowd, but the images shown on the screen were those of a reserved audience hiding under their umbrellas and cheering only when the cameras were focusing on their face. And isn’t it ironic that that the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall was totally barricaded?
I regretted not to go to the human chain held at the same time on the banks of the River Spree, next to the longest conserved part of the wall. Maybe the atmosphere there was a bit more natural and human than the ‘Festival of Freedom’.
The American historian Fukuyama wrote in 1989 that with the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the confrontation between Eastern and Western ideas, the success of Capitalism announced the end of history. At first I thought his theory was quite extreme; how could history possibly end? It’s when I found myself in that silent crowd, caught up in media frenzy, taking pictures of TV screens from mobile phones and leaving the place in line at the given time, that his point sadly started to make sense.
Words by Anais Bremond