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Joining together on Unity Day

October 3, 2014

In Hanover, Germans are celebrating reunification 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on Germans to confront the world's problems with the same spirit they have in the past.

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Tag der Deutschen Einheit 2014 Hannover
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Stratenschulte

On Friday, Angela Merkel (photo: second-right) again expressed her admiration for protesters in the former German Democratic Republic who helped bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989, paving the way for reunification in 1990 - the official cause for Friday's celebrations. Merkel, born in Hamburg in 1954 but raised in the former East Germany, called the country's reunification "a historical masterpiece."

"Without the courage of these citizens, without the pressure for reform that they created, the fall of the wall would not have happened," Merkel said.

Under the motto "United in Diversity," Merkel and President Joachim Gauck (center in photo) proved just a couple of the stars at the Hanover ceremony: They had a rich supporting cast of more than 1,000 invited guests, in addition to up to 500,000 visitors from north, south, east and west for two days of public events. Bigwigs included Constitutional Court President Andreas Voßkuhle (left), Bundestag President Norbert Lammert (second from left), Lower Saxony State Premier Stephan Weil (right), and the executives of several other German states, former President Christian Wulff, and former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Also present was Lothar de Maiziere - the cousin to Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere and, for just under six months, the first democratically elected leader of the German Democratic Republic and that country's final premier.

Tag der Deutschen Einheit 2014 Hannover
Two days of public events were part of the celebrationImage: picture-alliance/dpa/J. Stratenschulte

Each year, a different major city hosts the main celebrations to mark the national holiday, which falls on the anniversary of the reunification of the former West and East Germany on October 3, 1990. This November also marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a major step toward the fall of Soviet communism in most of the then Eastern bloc.

With the support of a girls' choir, Klaus Meine, of the hard-rock band Scorpions - initially formed as Nameless in Hanover in 1965, when reunification remained a distant dream - sang the wall-fall power ballad "Wind of Change" - Germany's top-selling song of all time.

mkg/shs (Reuters, dpa, AFP, epd)