The overzealous, over-event-managed celebration of 2009 — with circuitous, one-way routes, logjam entries and cops with machine guns — was a strange ossification of the spontaneity of 1989, writes Ben Gook from Berlin.
East Germany
Letter from...: Fall of the Berlin Wall: the 20th anniversary
PHOTO GALLERY: A now and then peek at the East/West German border
Photographer Jürgen Ritter spent much of the eighties recording the East/West German border. Over 20 years on, he revisits the sites to compare how much they’ve changed, moving from death strips to kids’ soccer ovals.
Was the fall of the Berlin Wall a planned government plot?
Was the iconic fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago not due to the accepted story of a stuff up at a press conference and then a spontaneous protest, but rather a well orchestrated political plan between both governments?
How a picnic brought down the Berlin Wall
On 19 August, 1989, 700 East Germans walked freely across their Soviet-controlled borders and into Hungary for some good food, wine and a spot of political revolution.
REVEALED: Thatcher feared the fall of the Wall
Documents smuggled out of the Kremlin have revealed details of a secret meeting between Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, where the Iron Lady stated plainly that Britain did not want Germany to be reunited.
How Jacko helped bring down the Wall
An uncovered internal Stasi file from Michael Jackson’s 1988 concert outside the Reichstag building in West Berlin reveal his East German fans, listening from the other side of the Berlin Wall, planned to riot and “test the limits of the security organ”.
Life was better under communism, say most East Germans
Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, nostalgic has kicked in for the German Democratic Republic. In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
Uncovered: real life in East Germany
The most comprehensive record ever of life in the German Democratic Republic after WWII has been uncovered in a basement. Welcome to Manfred Beier’s life behind the Iron Curtain.
