The World

By Chris Bryant, eastern Europe correspondent, in Berlin

When the idea was first mooted to topple a line of dominoes in the German capital to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many traditionalists apparently scoffed.

But talking to the excited crowds at the Brandenburg Gate on Monday, it was apparent that the 1.5km row of painted domino stones has become an instant hit, whose symbolism is apparent to all.

The approximately 1,000 stones – each standing around 2.5m tall – were painted by local schoolchildren and now stand along the former path of the Berlin Wall between the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz.

The first will be nudged over at around 1900 GMT by Lech Walesa, the co-leader of the Solidarity trade union, who campaigned for free elections in Poland in the 1980s and inspired civil rights activists in the former east Germany.

However, the dominoes will not be toppled all at once and instead two breaks “will provide an opportunity to remember the dramatic moments of twenty years ago, and the most important actors of the time”, according to the official blurb.

In the back of organisers’ minds may be the “River of Fire” which London hoped would electrify crowds celebrating the arrival of a new millenium.

But when the 200ft high wall of fire ignited at midnight on 1st January 2000 it, travelled so quickly along the River Thames that few spectators saw it.

“If we pushed the dominos over all together, they’d all fall down in five minutes. We wanted it to take a bit longer than that,” explained one official on Monday.

Related reading:

From the Archives 1989: Foreign Affairs
November 9: George Packer, The New Yorker
Where were you when the Berlin Wall came down? Gideon Rachman, FT