At an event marking the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Saturday, the city’s mayor, Kai Wegner, said November 9 remains a fateful day for Germany – both in a positive and negative sense.
The date marks both the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and of the beginning of a Nazi-led nationwide wave of terrorism against Jewish people in 1938, which came to be known as the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht.
“Those were incredible moments, incredible hours and days,” the mayor said, speaking of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which primarily recalls a positive event, when people pushed the wall aside, he said.
Wegner said he hopes that the spirit of optimism and solidarity from that time will return. He also underlined the value of freedom, saying the people who peacefully protested in 1989 should be considered role models.
Speaking alongside German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Wegner called on Germans to preserve freedom, saying “without freedom, everything else is nothing.”
“Freedom and democracy have never been a matter of course,” he said, adding that they are currently under attack both from outside forces and within.
Berlin’s other November 9
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched nationwide attacks during which synagogues were burned, businesses owned by Jewish people were looted and destroyed, and Jews were abused, arrested and murdered.
Speaking at Saturday’s commemorations, Wegner drew parallels to modern Berlin, saying: “Anti-Semitism is still a reality today, unfortunately also in our city, on our streets.”
He said the city administration is doing everything it can to ensure there is no place for this hatred. “But it remains all of our task to consistently oppose hatred of Jews – regardless of where it comes from and where it takes place.”
“Only in this way can we live up to the responsibility that our history imposes on us,” he said.
1989 revolution and today’s Ukraine
During the commemorative festivities of the fall of the Berlin Wall, people placed roses in a gap in the remaining wall in the north of the city to also commemorate the victims who died trying to cross the border between former East Berlin and West Berlin.
Several speakers addressed the war in Ukraine, which has been ongoing for two and a half years. “The values of the 1989 revolution are being defended today on the battlefields of Ukraine,” the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, Axel Klausmeier, said.
Klausmeier called on people to remember the yearning for freedom of that time and “to practise tolerance, defend democracy and human rights, and tirelessly promote the dream of peaceful coexistence.”
At the same time, he commemorated the November pogroms of 1938, saying it is intolerable that Jewish people in Germany have to again live in fear.
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