“Without freedom, everything else is nothing”
Germany commemorates the fall of the Berlin Wall with numerous events while at the same time remembering the November pogroms of 9 November 1938.
Berlin (dpa) – Berlin is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a large-scale installation, an official commemoration ceremony and various other events. One particular attraction is a temporary wall comprising 5,000 posters which runs through Berlin’s city centre along the path of the former East-West border. Speaking at a central memorial event in Berlin also attended by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Berlin’s Mayor Kai Wegner reminded the audience just how valuable freedom was: “It is vital to uphold freedom – because without freedom, everything else is nothing,” he said. “Freedom and democracy have never something to be taken for granted,” he noted, adding that the people of autumn 1989 were an excellent role model.
9 November was a fateful day for Germany in both a positive and negative sense, said Wegner, not least in view of the fact that the Nazi night of pogroms perpetrated against Jews took place on 9 November 1938. In a speech marking the anniversary of the anti-Semitic pogroms, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth said: “Horrific crimes were committed in plain sight in Germany on 9 November 1938. And not just on this one day.” The minister said it was essential for democracy and a crucial responsibility for the future to remember this day and also the later Holocaust – a crime against humanity that was unprecedented in its atrocity. “In these times in particular, it is very much to be welcomed that the Bundestag has now passed a joint, cross-party motion in the Bundestag to do even more to protect, preserve and strengthen Jewish life in Germany,” said Roth.