German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday praised the courageous citizens who peacefully brought down the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, calling the momentous day proof that “dreams can come true”.
Merkel, who grew up in the communist East, was speaking at a memorial site to the 138 people killed in Berlin alone as they tried to flee the Soviet-allied State. “The Berlin Wall, this symbol of State abuse cast in concrete, took millions of people to the limits of what is tolerable, and all too many beyond it,” she said. “It broke them.”
“little wonder that after the border opened, people took apart the hated structure with hammers and chisels. Within a year it had all but vanished from the cityscape.”Merkel, in an unusually emotional speech, said the lesson of November 9, 1989 was that “we can change things for the better — that is the message of the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
She said this was true for her reunified country and the world, “especially for the people in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and in many, many other regions of the world where liberty and human rights are threatened or being trampled”.“It is a message of confidence in our ability to tear down walls today and in future, walls of dictatorship, violence, ideology and hostility,” she said.