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Long life

A trip to Berlin with John Smith before the wall came down

<p>And before it became a centre of Bohemian decadence akin to the Weimar Republic</p>

15 November 2014

9:00 AM

15 November 2014

9:00 AM

Last Sunday night 8,000 illuminated balloons, tethered along eight miles of Berlin’s former inner-city border between East and West Germany, were released into the sky to commemorate the dismantling of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. The wall, built to stem a growing flood of East Berliners to the western part of the city, had stood from 1961 until 1989, when it was breached as the consequence of a muddled East German response to a wave of protest by people demanding democracy and freedom of movement against a background of liberalisation in the Soviet Union.

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