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The article discusses the celebrations on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 2014.

It sometimes seems that Germany is a country perpetually caught in the past. There are so many anniversaries that some sort of tracker is necessary to remember them all. Commemorations in 2019 included the seventieth anniversaries of the foundation of the Federal Republic and the formation of the NATO alliance, the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, the 100th anniversaries of the Treaty of Versailles, the foundation of the Weimar Republic, and German women achieving the right to vote. In 2020, important commemorations include the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the 250th anniversaries of Beethoven's and Hegel's birth, as well as the 100th anniversary of the HARIBO company that invented gummi bears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the mass media is an important tool that audiences rely on to learn about the past, the relationship among journalism, history, and memory is still underdeveloped; visual collective memory, like visual studies in other subfields, has received even less attention than written and textual representations of collective memory. To address that gap, this article uses a qualitative content analysis to assess how 15 newspapers commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s opening through photographs. Newspapers from countries that were capitalist and communist in 1989 are compared to identify the ways that different cultures ‘remember’ the same past. Five genres of images emerged: iconic photographs, memorials, metonymic and mythological portraits, metonymic relics, and images of resistance, though these genres were framed differently depending on a country’s political system in 1989. In comparing this cross-cultural collective memory, this study looks at what these visual commemorations reveal about cross-cultural anniversary practices, an area of memory studies that has received little attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initially after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and its state-sponsored demolition over the following year, only a handful of sites remained with pieces of the Berlin Wall still standing. These were magnets for foreign tourists, but Germans themselves, including German officials, were far more interested in creating a united future than in preserving parts of the divided past. With the passage of time, however, the Germans have increasingly come to believe in the importance of explaining the history of the Wall, commemorating its victims, and preserving its few authentic remains in Berlin. This article examines several key moments and debates in the process of the Germans coming-to-terms with the history of the Wall. It charts the process whereby the public and political leaders have devoted greater attention to the Wall in recent years, particularly on the occasions of the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of the fall of the Wall in 2004 and 2009 and the fiftieth anniversary of the erection of the Wall in 2011. Finally, the article analyzes lessons German politicians are drawing from the history of the Berlin Wall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe is a familiar story, and was widely revisited for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the commonly held Western narrative enshrines a number of exaggerations and myths. Communism did not fall because of Star Wars or firm rhetoric from Reagan and Thatcher. More important were the humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan and collapsing oil prices, which sealed the fate of communist Europe - and the people themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In East Berlin, the turn towards the historic city had its peak in 1987 with the celebration of Berlin's 750th anniversary. Only two years before the unforeseen fall of the Berlin Wall, the socialist leaders planned to reconstruct a glitzy shopping and entertainment district unheard of under the 'real existing socialism', which was to be designed with garish references to the historic appearance. The redesign of the central boulevard Friedrichstraße and the adjacent Platz der Akademie (Gendarmenmarkt) square, of which only a small portion was carried out, was the most ambitious among several prestige projects for the 750th anniversary celebrations. This article will demonstrate how the state-sponsored neo-historical design of the Friedrichstraße area adapted international architectural and planning models in its own particular way, promoting individual consumption rather than collective production and aiming at a particular form of subjective experience (Erlebnis). It will also demonstrate how the new design guidelines were based on an increasing acceptance of social inequality present within the socialist state. Thus it will show that the urban design policy before and after the German reunification was more similar than is usually conceded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article mentions the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which included the release of 8,000 illuminated balloons in Berlin, and a German Marshall Fund-organized panel session in Washington.