Comments:Thousands to celebrate twenty years since fall of Berlin Wall

Get your Balls to the Wall, man! How many people here know that not long before it fell plans were drawn up for the millenium replacement to the wall? As I recall, the machine guns fired themselves and were to be triggered by motion and microwave sensors were to be mounted on the wall itself. Blood Red Sandman (Talk)   (Contribs) 19:03, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm reliably informed that they already had some kind of automatic firing system. AFAIK it just sprayed bullets periodically, but I'm not too sure. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 07:32, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I wish…
The Berlin Wall fell just several months before I was born. If I could change one thing about what happened that night, I would make it so that I was there.

173.71.49.186 (talk) 22:24, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Memories of when the wall came tumbling down.
In the summer of 1988 I visited what was then still West Germany. One of the highlights of the trip was being taken to see the border with the GDR.

I vividly remember standing on a wooden platform built for the benefit of western tourists for whom totalitarianism was, and thankfully still is, an alarming oddity visited on less lucky peoples and looking across no man’s land to where it seemed a greasy grey crayon had been drawn along the horizon.

Looking back on the remarkable events that would unfold across Europe a year later it seems outlandish that one half of the continent was once walled off from the other by barbed wire and political dogma. At the time it was impossible to imagine the situation ever changing.

The messy compromises made at the end of WW2 that saw, as Churchill put it, an iron curtain descend over Europe, of which the Berlin Wall would become the most graphic symbol were some of the most shaming decisions taken in all of human history. That the whole mad system was eventually pulled down without a shot being fired is a testament to the courage, common sense and decency of ordinary people.