Well, they did it beautifully. Despite the rain, I found the official celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall a genuinely moving affair. The organizers, presumably guided by Chancellor Angela Merkel, got almost every accent right. Freedom, Europe and the wider world were the themes, not German unity.
Everyone was given their share of the credit: the East German woman from Leipzig who had been locked up by the Stasi for carrying a banner demanding “an open country with free people”; Poland's Lech Walesa and Solidarity; the Hungarians; Mikhail Gorbachev; the United States. (Oddly enough, the one person who did not receive adequate acknowledgment was Helmut Kohl.) And how good to put near the end of the celebration an interview with Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi pioneer of microcredits, who talked about the wall still separating rich north from poor south: die Mauer der Armut , the Poverty Wall.
So, three cheers for Germany and three cheers for Europe. Looking at the searchlights piercing the night sky above the Brandenburg Gate, we could reflect on the extraordinary distance travelled in a city that was at the heart of two world wars and the Cold War. But then it was over. The police started clearing away the crowd-control barriers; and at dinner, we were told, the leaders of the European Union were quietly conspiring about who should be the next chair of the European Council and the new high representative for foreign and security policy.
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