Berlin marks 30 years since fall of the wall in reflective mood

At the wall memorial on Bernauer Straße, chancellor Angela Merkel laid down a red rose, appealing to European leaders and visiting guests to “stand up for democracy and freedom, for human rights and tolerance”. Such values “must always be lived out and defended anew”, she said.

Above the Straße des 17 Juni, the central east-west boulevard named after the 1953 uprising in the GDR, a giant wave made up of 30,000 messages from Germans on little pieces of cloth fluttered in the wind. The work, by the US artist Patrick Shearn was entitled Freedom Cloud, but the emotional impact of walking underneath it was far from euphoric.