On the evening of November 9, 2014, a « chain of light » lit up the Berlin sky over the Wall’s former route through the city centre, before thousands of balloons rose toward the sky in evocation of the peaceful nature of the fall of the Wall 25 years earlier.
For 28 years the Wall separated the East and the West, dividing a city, a country, Europe, and the world. It was associated at the time with a painful history, although its history did not end on November 9, 1989. Even if only 1.5 km of the Wall remains, it is present everywhere in Berlin through its material and symbolic traces as well as its evocation in maps, photographs, songs…Tourism and economic activity connected to the Wall continue to prosper, with the Wall now recounting a different story, above all that of the end of the Cold War, and the joy and hopes that its fall sparked in Europe. Representations of the Wall testify to this more complex meaning that it took on.
