Tens thousands of Berliners braved cold and driving rain last night to attend an open-air spectacle at the Brandenburg Gate to mark the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Wall that divided the city for more than a quarter of a century.
Huddled beneath umbrellas, they listened to speeches from former civil rights activists as well as today's political leaders, with musical interludes from a succession of performers ranging from the Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, to the veteran erman pop star, Udo Lindenberg.
At a solemn commemoration in the Reichstag earlier, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder praised the thousands of ordinary easterners who precipitated the opening of the border between East and West by demonstrating against the oppressive regime in East Berlin.
"The Wall was not brought crashing to the ground in Washington, Bonn or Moscow. It was the brave and fearless people in the East that forced it to cave in," he said.
Although the Bundestag President, Mr Wolfgang Thierse, insisted that the people of the East were the true heroes of 1989, three retired politicians who spoke yesterday highlighted their own role in the events that changed the shape of Europe and ended the Cold War.
The former US president, Mr George Bush, claimed that his cool public reaction to the fall of the Wall helped to pave the way for the reunification of Germany. The former Soviet leader, Mr Mikhail Gorbachev, declared: "We did the right thing." And Germany's ex-chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, spoke of the key role that mutual trust between the three leaders had played in managing the events that followed the night of November 9th, 1989.
But it was the former East German pastor and civil rights activist, Mr Joachim Gauck, who now heads Germany's official investigation into the wrongs perpetrated by the Stasi secret police, who made the most powerful contribution. Recalling the months that followed the fall of the Wall, he spoke of the brief, joyful time when ordinary easterners attempted to shape their country's future, becoming ministers in the last East German government.
"It was a dream of a life and it was reality," he said.
Most former civil rights activists have been sidelined politically since unification and it was only as an afterthought that Mr Gauck was invited to speak yesterday. But he told his audience, most of whom were westerners, that the civil courage shown by the people of the East 10 years ago was something all Germans could learn from.
"We can look you in the eye - poorer, but not broken and certainly not as beggars," he said.
Mr Gorbachev struck the only discordant note of the day when he questioned this week's decision to jail Egon Krenz, the East German leader who opened the Wall in 1989, for his part in the shooting of hundreds of people attempting to escape to the West.
Yesterday was also the anniversary of Hitler's pogrom against the Jews in 1938, known as the Reichskristallnacht, when Nazi thugs attacked synagogues throughout Germany and murdered dozens of Jews.
"It is a day of joy but also a day of shame and reflection," Mr Schroder said.
When the chancellor climbed on to the rain-soaked platform at the Brandenburg Gate last night, he was greeted with chants of "Helmut! Helmut!" from part of the crowd. Standing a few feet away from the man who drove him from office last year, Dr Kohl was unable to suppress a broad grin.
