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It’s hard to believe that it’s been gone almost as long as it existed, but today marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the scar that marred Europe’s maps and landscape for more than a quarter century. Most of the world leaders are gathering in Berlin<\/a> this week to celebrate the end of that monument to the imprisonment of the human spirit.<\/p>\n

After 28 years as prisoners of their own country, euphoric East Germans streamed to checkpoints and rushed past bewildered border guards, many falling tearfully into the arms of West Germans welcoming them on the other side.<\/p>\n

The fall of the Wall sent shockwaves around the world that night, abruptly ending the Cold War and paving the way for the unification of Germany, which had been divided since the end of World War II.<\/p>\n

“The destruction of the Iron Curtain on November 9, 1989 is still the most remarkable political event of most people’s lifetimes: it set free millions of individuals and it brought to an end a global conflict that threatened nuclear annihilation,” British weekly The Economist said this week.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, not all of the world’s leaders will be there – ours won’t. But then, he has no sense of history that doesn’t relate directly to him.<\/p>\n

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Anyway, I wrote a post about one of my experiences on the border<\/a> in the early 80s along with some pictures, in case you missed it back then. Here are some more of my pictures from that thankfully bygone era;<\/p>\n

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been gone almost as long as it existed, but today … Twenty years gone<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical","category-military-issues"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15512"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15512\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}