Berlin Wall: Worst Anniversary Celebration Ever

It was immediately obvious wandering through Berlin last weekend that the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall were in trouble.

In Alexanderplatz subway station, the main eastern transport hub, wall-sized billboards advertising the Fest der Freiheit -- Festival of Freedom -- were side by side with huge Burger King ads for a new grilled cheese snack. The tag line: “The Cheese Revolution.”

Sure, it’s easy to celebrate the events of November 9, 1989, in the abstract. After all, what’s not to like about casting off the shackles of a dictatorial system in which people couldn’t freely express their opinion and were shot for trying to leave, in which tens of thousands of citizens spied in each other, and in which you might be denied a place at university or a job if your parents weren’t party members --  But when it comes to putting on an actual celebration, as the city of Berlin learned, it gets trickier.

The weekend kicked off with U2 playing a free concert Thursday night at the Brandenburg Gate as part of the MTV European Music Awards. The band distributed 10,000 free tickets for the pen where the show would take place. But in a move that, as it turned out, set the tone for the entire anniversary, U2 played behind an opaque wall, making it impossible for those without tickets to see the free show intended to mark -- lest we forgot the full extent of idiocy here -- the fall of the wall.

As for Monday night’s Festival of Freedom, huge numbers of Berliners have been for one reason or another sufficiently disgruntled at the chain of events subsequent to the fall of the wall, that they can no longer celebrate the fall as a discrete accomplishment -- and as a result cannot celebrate its fall at all. Much of the crowd, then, consisted of foreigners along with Germans not old enough to remember the actual events.

For those who did go out to the festival, doused by icy rain showers, it only got worse. The fall of the wall was such a symbolically important event that the you assume festival organizers would have been hyper-conscious of symbolism in the anniversary events. Not so.

The main events were centered around the Brandenburg Gate, which sits directly on the old fault line between East and West Berlin. All the staged aspects of the night -- various musical performances, the main television host, the VIP seating -- are on the west side of the Gate and in the case of the performances, they are all facing west, with their asses to the East.

To make matters worse, on the night of the Freedom Fest it was impossible to approach the Gate from the East. Unter den Linden -- the main boulevard stretching from Alexanderplatz past museum island, the opera, and Humboldt University -- was entirely closed by the time the festival kicked into gear. Instead of just reserving a lane for emergency vehicles, the full width of the boulevard as well as the broad, tree-lined median strip was blockaded by police vehicles and temporary barriers.

The scene was dishearteningly reminiscent of concerts at the Brandenburg Gate during the 1980s. Back then, acts including David Bowie, Genesis and the Eurythmics played open-air shows to West Berlin audiences right at the Gate; Eastern music fans would try to congregate on the GDR side to hear the music wafting over the wall only to be blocked and end up clashing with police.

When Bon Jovi and Paul Van Dyk sang their songs, they had their backs to the East. Berlin-based Van Dyk, popular elsewhere in the world for his pop-cheese take on techno, can’t get arrested in Berlin, where some of the most revered electronic music clubs in the world take their tunes far more seriously. Bon Jovi sang a song -- called “We Weren’t Born to Follow” -- that in the context sounded unforgivably patronizing. Then the band got a plug for their upcoming tour. The crowd jeered.