On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Three Germans from different generations recount their experience, 20 years after those momentous events.
Cliewe Juritza
With a backpack strapped over his shoulders, Cliewe Juritza heads for Bernauer Street where he is to meet a group of tourists who booked his services for a tour of the remains of the Berlin Wall.
At 43, Mr Juritza is not your average tourist guide. He experienced the brutality of the division first-hand, having been born in East Berlin five years after the wall was built by a paranoid East German Communist regime.
Bernauer Street symbolised not only the cruelty of separation but also its absurdity. The borderline between east and west was located on the pavement, with people on one side of the street living in East Berlin, with the entrance to their front door abutting onto the western part. When the wall went up, it passed through their homes, blocking the front door.
Mr Juritza was arrested in 1984 for trying to escape to the West and link up with his grandmother. Yet he makes no claim to fame.
"I was just one of many," he says of his 10-month jail term that ended when the West German government paid for his release.
The wall that created so much pain is today Mr Juritza's source of income as he recounts to tourists the division it caused to families and the death it brought to those who dared escape the suffocating clutches of a repressive regime.
He is taken aback when asked whether there was a weak spot in the wall that was exploited by escaping East Germans.
"There was no easy way out. No weak points. People lost their lives trying to escape to freedom," he says, recalling the 171 people who died trying to escape, although the exact figure remains disputed.
Mr Juritza was arrested when he was 18 after travelling to the Hungarian capital, Budapest. It was his third attempt. His plan was to reach the border town of Sopron from where he would try and flee to Austria.
"I purchased a one-way train ticket to Sopron and that provided the police with sufficient grounds to arrest me. For them, there was no reason why an 18-year-old East German should travel to a border town with a one-way ticket except to escape," he says.
Of course, the police made the correct assumption. Many East Germans attempted to escape into Austria from Hungary where border controls were believed to be more lax.
In fact, the chain of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall may be traced back to the Hungarian government's decision six months earlier to dismantle the border fence with Austria.
"I could not see myself living all my life behind a wall. Nobody believed the wall would come down," Mr Juritza says, recalling the frustration felt by a generation that was born after the wall went up.
However, what one generation never deemed possible, another believed in.
Gert Weisskirchen, a 65-year-old former member of the German parliament's foreign affairs committee, knew Berlin before the wall went up.
Gert Weisskirchen
"I had this vision in my mind and heart of what Berlin could be but was not. I knew what Berlin was without a wall, and many people of my generation had this vision of an undivided city," he says.
In 1961, at the age of 15, Prof. Weisskirchen recalls his first visit to Berlin with his parents, who attended a congress of Lutheran churches.
The wall had not been built yet and despite the difficulty of living in a politically divided city, Berliners from east and west could still coexist. This came to a brutal end four weeks later. Prof. Weisskirchen was later a West German member of parliament with the Social Democratic Party. He participated in the Helsinki Process, a political project that brought together East European dissidents.
"We believed the wall was artificial and that it would come to an end someday. Maybe it would not end in our lifetime but we believed it would come to an end," he says, recalling the emotional moments on November 9, 1989, when East Germans tore the wall down with their own hands.
He acknowledges that 20 years after those momentous events, East Germans have not benefitted enough from the promised prosperity of German unity.
Data published in May by Paritätische Gesamtverband, an umbrella group for German charitable associations, showed that in eastern Germany the average poverty rate is around 20 per cent.
Factories shut down in many towns in East Germany, and since reunification, unemployment rates have climbed significantly after an exodus of young people looking for work in the West.
The bleak prospects in the east have ironically strengthened the far-left Die Linke, made up of reformed former communists and disenchanted drop-outs from the Social Democrats.
Their former leader, Oskar Lafontaine, who resigned after last month's election, left the SPD in 2005 and was instrumental in creating a mainstream far-left alternative for voters disaffected by the Social Democrats' centrist course.
Jochen Thies studied political science and German history and works as a special correspondent in the editorial office for Deutschlandradio Berlin.
He laments the disappointing performance of his country after reunification.
"History gives you a gift and it must be nourished. I am disappointed by my country's performance over the past 20 years," he says, with regret at the lack of economic prospects in the east. Today, Berlin is unrecognisable from the divided city it was 20 years ago, except for the lamp posts, which are different between east and west, and the tram system, which only runs in the east.
The young people of Berlin mix freely, almost oblivious to the past that divided their parents. Dennis, a 19-year-old, says the young do not really care or even remember the wall.
He drives a rickshaw as a part-time job to give him enough money to go to university next year. Between one trip and another, ferrying tourists around Berlin's city centre, he says East Germans feel they were cheated since not enough prosperity has reached them despite the promise of wealth.
Among the older generation, he adds, the "wall of the mind still exists".
The wall's impact on Malta
They may still fail to see eye-to- eye on most issues, but President Emeritus Eddie Fenech Adami and former Labour foreign minister agree on one thing: the fall of the Berlin Wall delayed Malta's entry into the European Union.
Dr Fenech Adami, who was Prime Minister in 1989, and Alex Sceberras Trigona, who by that time was Labour foreign affairs spokesman, yesterday debated the implications of the fall of the Berlin Wall - which drove Europe into an unprecedented unification - during a public seminar at the new offices of the European Commission and European Parliament in Valletta.
Both main speakers agreed that while east European countries scrambled to join the EU, Malta's own bid suffered. Dr Fenech Adami, who was the first head of government to cross a breach in the Berlin wall on November 20, 1989, said it was "an exasperating 14-year wait" for membership.
Still, he lauded the EU's courage for taking in so many countries in at one go in 2004. After the fall of the wall, the EU was urged to embrace these countries' desire for a different standard of living, and it reacted well, Dr Fenech Adami said.
The free market delivered the goods, Dr Fenech Adami said, although he emphasised a preference for a social market economy.
Dr Sceberras Trigona reacted by voicing concerns about the end of the ideological debate with the fall of communism.
"The infringement of economic and social rights needs to be addressed," Dr Sceberras Trigona said.
He referred to the economic crisis as a sign that capitalism did not deliver all the goods. He referred to Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay The End of History where he argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the final form of human government - words he later recanted.
Dr Fenech Adami agreed that the financial crisis pointed to weaknesses in the present system, but said a united, democratic Europe equipped to face the challenges of the future was positive.
He said there were also negatives since 1989: "The bad thing is that most of us are losing our values. We are losing respect for the fundamental values of humanity itself... we are thinking in a relativistic way."
This statement was questioned by the head of the European Parliament in Malta, Julian Vassallo, who remarked that human dignity had in fact been enhanced, with more opportunity for individuals to achieve their potential.
"The changes to our freedoms today make us more complete human beings," Dr Vassallo said.
However, according to a survey by the Forsa Institute published in Stern magazine, one in seven Germans today still pine for the days when Europe was divided.
Divisions remain strong, politically and psychologically, and in recent parliamentary elections western districts in Berlin voted overwhelmingly for the conservative Christian Democrats, while the city's eastern half backed the Left Party, an alliance of ex-communists, socialists, and Greens.
ksansone@timesofmalta.com, cmuscat@timesofmalta.com