Twenty years since the Berlin wall came down
Updated
Twenty years ago today, one of the most enduring symbols of the Cold War - the Berlin Wall - began to fall, taking with it divisions that had cleaved both the city and the world for decades.
The fall of the wall was also the biggest domino in a tumbling of regimes and barriers right across Europe and into the Soviet Union. Now some of those leading political and social figures of the time are returning to Berlin for commemorative events that have been dubbed the Festival of Freedom.
Presenter: Scott Bevan
Speakers: PeterGrimm, former East German opposition activist; Vladimir Kulagin former senior Foreign Ministry official in the Soviet Union; Klaus Wowereit, Mayor of Berlin
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PETER GRIMM: This good feeling to see it now 20 years later.
SCOTT BEVAN: Peter Grimm has joined thousands of others in Alexanderplatz - a focal point of the former East Berlin - to look at an outdoor exhibition commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events leading to it. He sees a photo of opposition activists and points out a familiar face - his own.
PETER GRIMM: I am here, end of June, 1986.
SCOTT BEVAN: As a young East Berliner, Peter Grimm hated the wall that had divided his city and country since it was erected by the Communist East German Government in 1961.
The wall came to be a potent symbol of the Cold War, and it was used as a rampart on which politicians from either side stood to deliver words to each other, as then US President Ronald Reagan did in 1987.
RONALD REAGAN: Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
SCOTT BEVAN: Activist Peter Grimm also used words to voice his opposition to the wall and the restrictions on his life that it represented. He helped publish underground newspapers and organised demonstrations.
PETER GRIMM: For many people, worldwide, was the Berlin Wall a symbol of the parted world, and east and west, and nobody could imagine that this can go so easy.
SCOTT BEVAN: Yet through the autumn of 1989, change was sweeping Eastern Europe. East Germans were taking advantage of the relaxing of border restrictions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia to get to the west.
Demonstrations demanding reforms flared across East Germany. On the 9th November, the East German Government relented, opening border crossings to West Germany. Its citizens besieged the Berlin Wall and checkpoints were opened.
(Sound of cheering)
Peter Grimm again.
PETER GRIMM: I was waked up with the sentence 'the wall is open'. You come from the deep sleep and you can't believe it.
SCOTT BEVAN: As the wall came down over the coming weeks, the shock waves quickly extended far beyond Berlin.
Vladimir Kulagin was a senior Foreign Ministry official in the Soviet Union and he remembers thinking this would lead to the end of the Warsaw Pact and ultimately the dismantling of the Soviet Union.
VLADIMIR KULAGIN: The collapse of the Berlin Wall, I believe, is the number-one event in the 20th century.
SCOTT BEVAN: Why is that?
VLADIMIR KULAGIN: Because the Communist experiment which Russians decided to take on themselves, you know, failed.
SCOTT BEVAN: The Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, says the fall of the wall that divided his city for so long is not only historically significant but it reverberates into the present.
KLAUS WOWEREIT: I think it's a good symbol for the power of emotion and the power of movement from citizens.
SCOTT BEVAN: And it was an event that changed history, a country and lives - which is what the former East German opposition activist Peter Grimm is celebrating today.
PETER GRIMM: Of course, it is a feeling, yes we were successful. We have done the right things.
