It was being billed yesterday as the biggest party in Europe. More than a hundred thousand mainly young people have flown to the German capital to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the hacking down of the Berlin Wall.

The revellers will be joined during today’s festivities by 31 heads of state and government, over a dozen Nobel Prize winners and a cluster of rock stars who stayed on in the city after last week’s MTV European Music Awards.

In theory, then, Berlin should be the hottest place on the continent. In reality, many Germans will be staying at home — partly because they consider the night of November 9, 1989, to be a matter for private reflection, and partly because, until the Wall fell, this was a day of mourning and contrition.

On November 9, 1938, Nazis launched the Kristallnacht pogrom in which 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were set ablaze and hundreds of German Jews killed. That is the reason why November 9 was never declared a national holiday.

Times Archive, 1989: Berliners cross the Wall to freedom

East Germany declared last night that its citizens could leave the country at all crossing points

• Day trip to freedom for thousands

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• Archive: the other November 9 anniversary - Kristallnacht

So no nationwide street parties, no ticker-tape parades, no triumphalism. The foreign visitors who have flocked to the capital — flights and hotels are almost completely booked up — will rave through the night in clubs that have slashed their prices, but the Germans are likely to be more muted. Newspapers call it a Day of German Destiny, by which they mean that bad things as well as good happened.

As a result, Europe’s biggest, most exciting party looks set to be a rather worthy event. A chain of white handkerchiefs has been strung along part of the former frontier. Brightly painted murals on a stretch of the Wall known as the East Side Gallery have been restored. The highlight will be the toppling of 1,000 foam dominos positioned along a former stretch of the Berlin Wall between the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz.

Whether anyone under 30 will remember that this used to be the death strip dividing East and West is an open question. The first person to push over a stone will be Lech Walesa, former leader of the Polish Solidarity union, to demonstrate that his country began the unravelling of communism.

It will take a few minutes for the dominos to fall and not much longer for the Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and her guests — Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, President Sarkozy, President Medvedev and Gordon Brown — to make their speeches under the torch-lit Brandenburg Gate.

After the leaders have said their words, they will then retire to a state dinner — the Europeans among them to discuss, doubtless, who should be the first EU president — and the crowd around the gate will listen to Jon Bon Jovi singing We Weren’t Born to Follow, a song apparently inspired by the peaceful revolutions of 1989. Then a fireworks display and off for an early night, since Tuesday is a normal working day.

On the night that the Berlin Wall fell, the easterners were given free beer in western pubs. Twenty years later, there will be no free treats.

The reluctance to celebrate German unity is partly down to the financial strain of taking over the almost bankrupt German Democratic Republic. A report issued by the Institute of Economic Research in Halle at the weekend calculated that about €1,300 billion (£1,162 billion) has been spent for the development of eastern Germany since the Wall came down — an extraordinary transfer that many western Germans believe has held back the west.

Once the celebrations are over, all the signs are that the new German Government will try to right the balance, with new motorways and transport hubs being promised to boost the neglected west.

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