People walk next to a miniature representing the Berlin Wall placed on the bricks at the site of the former wall near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin November 8, 2009. As the highlight of a 5-million euro ($7.4 million) celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, a 1.5-km (one mile) long segment of the Wall will stand for two days along its original route in front of the Brandenburg Gate to the Potsdamer Platz. The row of 1,000 20 kg dominos standing 1.5 metres apart — painted in bright colours by school children and rising 2.5 metres high — will be toppled at the end of a gala ceremony as a symbolic tribute to the collapse of the Wall 20 years earlier.
REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
Tomorrow night, at the climax of the biggest official party seen in Europe, with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, hosting Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president ? to name but a few ? the slabs will crash into one another like dominos, representing the chain of events that 20 years ago brought the cold war to an end. The first ?domino? will be pushed over, fittingly enough, by Lech Walesa and Miklos Nemeth, the veteran Polish and Hungarian anti-communist campaigners. They will be joined by two other main actors in the drama of 1989: the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the then West German foreign minister.