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Berlin celebrates 30 years of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Wall. Present the leaders of Visegrad

November 9, 2019

Bernauer Strasse is still today a place full of memories of the Wall. It is no coincidence that it was chosen as the main theater for the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the peaceful revolution that put an end to the GDR on November 9th 1989. In 1961, when it was built, East Germany incorporated a section of that road into the strip of death. The inhabitants of the houses that faced the frontier began to throw themselves out of the windows so as not to remain on the wrong side of the Wall. Already in the following year, under the Bernauer Strasse some irreducible heroes of freedom built the first tunnels to save the East Germans from imprisonment which Walter Ulbricht he had condemned them. And until 1985 the Church of Reconciliation that faced that street was stuck in the death strip, before the regime razed it to the ground.
It has been rebuilt and returned to religious functions, the bell tower has also been rebuilt and recently inaugurated: part of the ceremony will also take place here. To date, Bernauer Strasse is one of the rare points in the city where remnants of the most horrible wound that divided Germany survive.

The official celebrations for the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall will begin in the morning at 9.30 am at the headquarters of the Presidency of the Republic, at the castle of Bellevue, with a greeting from the Head of State, Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the four leaders of Visegrad.The President of Poland will attend. Andrzej Duda, that of the Czech Republic, Miloš Zeman, the homologation of the Slovak Republic, Zuzana? Aputova is Janos Ader, head of the Hungarian State. The four will accompany Steinmeier and the chancellor Angela Merkel also in subsequent ceremonies.

At 10.30 Merkel, Steinmeier and the four leaders of Visegrad will move to Bernauer Strasse, to commemorate the German peaceful revolution, then they will visit the monument dedicated to the revolts that opened a breach in the Iron Curtain also in Eastern Europe, where it is a speech by Steinmeier is expected. The official ceremony will end at 11.15 with a declaration by Merkel to the Church of Reconciliation.

In the afternoon the witness of the anniversary will pass to the city of Berlin, which organized a concert in another symbolic place of the divided city from 5.30 pm, at the Brandenburg Gate which for three decades remained inaccessible, crossed by the death strip. Among the guests, Daniel Barenboim, director of the Staatsoper, the techno legend DJ WestBam, Anna Loos, International Band, Zugezogen Maskulin, Die ZOllner, Dirk Michaelis is Trettmann.

Five years ago, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, the main event of the celebrations had been a walk by Angela Merkel, Lech Walesa is Mikhail Gorbachev on the bridge of Bornholmer Strasse, the first gap that opened just before midnight on November 9, 1989.

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