Berlin marks 30 years since fall of the wall in reflective mood

Thirty years ago, Elfriede Begrich delivered a stirring sermon to a packed Gethsemane church in East Berlin. She quoted Deuteronomy 2.7: “God watches over you as you wander through this great wilderness”. “In those days every verse in the Bible sounded like a political manifesto,” the former Protestant pastor recalled this Saturday.

Her congregation got the message. On 4 November 1989 they flooded onto the streets by the thousands bearing lit candles to protest against a repressive East German regime that days later would yield power to people and raise the toll bars at the border crossings in the city. As the reunified German capital commemorated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, revellers were able to hear Begrich’s words again.

Related: World has failed to learn lessons of Berlin Wall, say film-makers

A filmed re-enactment of the pivotal protest in Alexanderplatz, directed by her son Aljoscha and the Argentinian artist Lola Arias, played on a loop inside the nearby ruins of the former East German statistics office, one of 200 commemorative events playing out at seven locations across the city. Begrich was the only performer who had chosen to play herself.

Flooded with the memories of the dramatic last few days of the socialist republic, she recalled the “immense feeling of freedom” on the streets that day. But reliving the emotion was no longer easy. “30 years on, remembering those days is a much more contemplative process than even on the 20th anniversary”, she said. “The memory of my emotions is tainted with a certain darkness.

“I had taken to the streets for a third way, not the old socialism we had in the GDR, but neither the rapacious Manchester capitalism of the west. I wanted socialism with a human face … But the peaceful revolution soon slipped from the grasp of those who really wanted it. It became the revolution of those who wanted to buy colour TVs and bananas.”

The 72-year-old was not the only Berliner in a reflective mood on Saturday. Previous Berlin Wall anniversaries have been triumphant events. 10 years ago, the city organised two kilometres of gigantic styrofoam slabs to be lined up between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, which were then toppled like dominoes.

For the 25th anniversary in 2014, the artist brothers Christopher and Marc Bauder created a lichtgrenze or “border of light”, made up of 8,000 balloons along a 15km portion of the strip that once separated east and west. Thousands oo-ed and ah-ed as the symbolic border vanished into the night sky.

This year, however, there was no single unifying event that brought Berliners together, and few of the artworks and events across the city dealt specifically with the border construction and its disappearance.

(May 8, 1945) 

Second world war ends and the Red Army captures Berlin. The city is divided in half; the Soviet Union in the east, and the British, Americans and French in the west.

(June 24, 1948) 

The Soviets begin the Berlin blockade. The following day the United States begins the Berlin air lift delivering food and fuel supplies to the city.

(May 12, 1949) 

The Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany, is founded. Twelve days later the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, is founded.

(September 30, 1949) 

Berlin airlift ends.

(June 17, 1953) 

The Red Army steps in to suppress riots by East Berlin workers over work conditions.

(August 13, 1961) 

The border between East and West Berlin is closed. Soldiers start to build the wall, at first with barbed wire and light fencing which in the coming years develops into a heavily complex series of wall, fortified fences, gun positions and watchtowers that are heavily guarded. The wall ended up being 96 miles long and the average height of the concrete divide was 11.8ft.

(August 19, 1961) 

The wall claims its first life as a man falls trying to climb down from his top-floor flat in Bernauerstrasse in East Berlin, to reach the pavements of West Germany.

(June 26, 1963) 

US President John F Kennedy visits the wall vowing to protect East Berlin, famously declaring "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner).

(May 15, 1973) 

East and West Germany establish formal diplomatic ties.

(June 12, 1987) 

President Ronald Reagan visits Berlin calling for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall.

(August 19, 1989) 

The Pan-European Picnic takes place, a peace demonstration held on the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron.

(September 10, 1989) 

Hungary opens its border with Austria. More than 13,000 refugees flee into Austria.

(November 4, 1989) 

More than a million people attend a pro-democracy rally in East Berlin's central square. The East German government resigns within days.

(November 9, 1989) 

The wall is pulled down as thousands of East Germans celebrate entering West Berlin.

Helen Pidd

At the wall memorial on Bernauer Straße, chancellor Angela Merkel laid down a red rose, appealing to European leaders and visiting guests to “stand up for democracy and freedom, for human rights and tolerance”. Such values “must always be lived out and defended anew”, she said.

Above the Straße des 17 Juni, the central east-west boulevard named after the 1953 uprising in the GDR, a giant wave made up of 30,000 messages from Germans on little pieces of cloth fluttered in the wind. The work, by the US artist Patrick Shearn was entitled Freedom Cloud, but the emotional impact of walking underneath it was far from euphoric.

By the Oberbaumbrücke Oberbaum bridge in Friedrichshain, a chain of neon buoys and swimming beacons bobbed silently in the waters of the Spree to mark the old liquid border, its lights constantly moving but never disappearing.

At Alexanderplatz, footage of the 1989 demonstrations, which had flared up in protest against evident electoral fraud at communal elections in May that year, was projected onto the grey facade of shopping malls. On Breitscheidplatz and Kurfürstendamm boulevard, light shows and performances recreated the western perspective of the last days of the iron curtain.

Berlin’s senate had spent around €10m (£8.6m) on these decentralised “storytelling locations”, apparently fully resigned to the fact that in 2019 there was not one way to tell the story of the end of the cold war and the collapse of Soviet socialism that everyone could sign up to.

According to a survey by the polling institute Forsa, published by the Berliner Zeitung newspaper this week, 87% of the city’s inhabitants are happy that it is no longer divided, but 42% felt the process of reunification had taken place too quickly. Many, like Elfriede Begrich, had hoped for at least symbolic gestures to assure them that the new Germany would be a fusion of its two halves, rather than a takeover by the west: a new anthem, perhaps, or a new flag.

For her son Aljoscha Begrich, who usually works as a director for Berlin’s Gorki theatre, positive memories prevailed on Saturday. “The overriding memory I have is of this rapid expansion of my personal horizon. On the maps of Berlin we had at school, the western half of the city was always greyed out. My teacher once said ‘West Berlin doesn’t exist’, and until I went over on the 10th, I had sort of believed him.”

He still felt, however, that the kind of triumphant show with which the city marked previous anniversaries no longer worked in 2019. What he wanted to show with his re-enactment, entitled Audition for a Demonstration, is that the truth about 1989 is complex. “There are contradictory biographies, like the one of my mother, whose church sheltered punks and environmentalists pursued by the state, but who now votes for the Left party, the successor party of the Socialist Unity party she was protesting against then. It wasn’t just one, two, three and then the Brandenburg Gate is open.”

A second video installation in the same building speaks directly of another reason why celebrations of this year’s anniversary feel so muted. Henrike Naumann’s Day X splices together footage of the peaceful revolution with fictionalised eyewitness accounts until it is no longer clear whether the observer is watching a documentary about events in 1989 or rightwing coup in 2019.

At state elections in the east German states this year, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has surged to second place, often by capitalising on resentment about the handling of reunification and reclaiming the language of the ‘89 protest movement. The slogan of one of the AfD’s campaign posters read Vollende die Wende: “Complete the peaceful revolution.”

In German history, 9 November is a date burdened with meaning for several reasons. It is not just the anniversary of the end of a 40-year separation, but also of the Night of Broken Glass, the pogrom against Jewish citizens carried out by Nazi paramilitaries in 1938.

Before Elfriede Begrich headed into Berlin centre to see her son’s work, she had taken part in a church service to commemorate the latter event.

“I can see why the 30th anniversary matters, but maybe we’ve all had enough of the wall now for a bit.”