On the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin’s mayor Kai Wegner recalled the value of freedom. “Uphold freedom, because without freedom everything else is nothing,” said the CDU politician at a central memorial event with Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the Berlin Wall Memorial. “Freedom and democracy have never been a given.” They are currently being attacked from outside and within. That’s why we have to take the people of autumn 1989 as role models.

November 9th was a fateful day for Germany, both positively and negatively, said Wegner. On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we see above all the positive side. Back then, people pushed the wall aside. “Those were unbelievable moments, unbelievable hours and days.” He would like the atmosphere from back then to return, says Wegner, because 1989 was about optimism and solidarity.

During the ceremony, the participants, including relatives of Wall victims, civil rights activists and young people from Poland, France and Norway, stuck roses into a crack in the remaining wall on Bernauer Strasse – also to remember the victims.

Several speakers also discussed the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine that has been going on for two and a half years. “The values ​​of the 1989 revolution are being defended today on the battlefields of Ukraine,” said the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, Axel Klausmeier.

Basically, he added: “Remembering the people’s longing for freedom back then obliges us to take responsibility. To live tolerance, to defend democracy and human rights and to tirelessly promote the dream of peaceful coexistence.” Klausmeier said he also wanted to remember the pogrom night of November 9, 1938. It is unbearable that Jews in Germany have to live in fear again.