Berlin celebrates the domino effect

THE dominoes fell, one by one, all 1,000 of them, covering 1.5km along the path of the 43km fence that kept Berliners imprisoned for 28 years.

Unlike the bright crisp day when East Berliners flooded through to the forbidden West, rain fell on Berlin last night.

But the area around the city’s most iconic monument, the Brandenburg Gate, was filled with the school children and others who helped paint the 2.5m high foam dominoes.

The heads of both the axis and allies that fought the Second World War that led to the division not just of Germany but also of Europe sheltered under plastic covering.

They clapped to the music, listened contritely to Arnold Schonberg’s poem, A survivor from Warsaw, and walked through the Brandenburg Gate.

In speeches that recalled the past and looked towards the future, French President Nicholas Sarkozy was followed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a video of President Barack Obama, Chancellor Merkel by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Earlier Ms Merkel escorted the man whose inaction allowed it all to happen, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbechov, and former Solidarity leader and Polish President Lech Walesa, across the Bornholm Bridge that was the first check point to open on that fateful evening.

The Chancellor was a 35-year-old physicist living in East Berlin at the time.

Yesterday she told Mr Gorbachev, “You made this possible. You courageously let things happen, and that was much more than we could expect”.

While pride of place was given to the US, Britain, France and Germany, the leaders of the other countries held hostage behind the Iron Curtain were also there. Poland’s Walesa knocked the first domino.

Fittingly former prime minister of Hungary Miklós Németh also knocked over a domino. He made the decision August 20 years ago to allow East Germans pass to the West through Hungary, setting off the chain reaction that led to Communist regimes falling.

The first event of the day, however, was a service in the Chapel of Reconciliation to remember the 136 people who died trying to flee East Berlin. Several survivors who managed to escape attended.

November 9 has another significance not forgotten in Berlin last night, as the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht, a night that marked the end of democracy and the beginning of the Holocaust.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen said while Ireland did not fight in the war, we did play a part in Germany’s reunification, “We held the EU presidency in the first half of 1990 and greatly facilitated the momentum behind the unification of Germany”, he said.

And arising out of that was the reunification of Europe in an enlarged EU.