Angela Merkel waded through a cheering crowd yesterday to make the journey across Berlin’s former East-West border — and into her own past.

The German Chancellor’s walk through the rain over the scruffy steel Boesebruecke — the first frontier checkpoint to open its gates 20 years ago — had the air of an afternoon stroll.

The low-key tone was deliberate. Ms Merkel has personalised the festivities marking the fall of the Berlin Wall, shifting the focus away from the 31 leaders in the city, the Nobel laureates and the rock stars, and into a celebration of the East German people, cowed by a police state for four decades, who discovered their courage in 1989. Ms Merkel, no dissident or heroine, was one of them.

Accompanied by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, and Lech Walesa, the former leader of the Polish Solidarity movement, the German leader was careful to point out that the Berlin Wall came down because of their help.

The night the Wall came down

The photographer Robert Wallis was in Berlin by chance on November 9, 1989. Here he shares his pictures and memories

• Timeline: 50 years in Berlin

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BACKGROUND

• Last leader of GDR reflects on his legacy

• Hungarian guard who helped to end communism

• How Thatcher tried to stop Berlin Wall falling

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• Time for Germany to re-enagage with Europe

“We weren’t the first,” she said. “Solidarity in Poland was important because it came from the heart of the working class. It showed us what was possible in a supposedly workers’ and peasants’ state.

“As for Mikhail Gorbachev,” she said, pointing to him, “You made it possible.” The crowd shouted “Bravo!” and “Gorby, Gorby!” just as they had in October 1989 when he visited the East German regime and gave it the kiss of death with criticism of Erich Honecker, the Communist chief.

The largely peaceful revolutions of 1989 had many fathers, Ms Merkel made plain, but in essence they came down to one key factor: the citizens of Eastern Europe losing, or at least overcoming, their fear.

She seemed more at ease with the former East German dissidents on the bridge linking the eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg with the western district of Wedding than with the foreign leaders. They were in Berlin because it was a must-do event, guaranteeing a television audience of millions. Only Helmut Kohl, too infirm, and President Obama, who delivered a message shown on a video-screen,— seemed to be absent.

The tenor Placido Domingo sang a Berlin ditty and the conductor Daniel Barenboim led an open-air classical concert, ensuring that the anniversary was presented as an epochal moment. One thousand dominos were positioned along a stretch of the former wall and were duly toppled by Mr Walesa.

Gordon Brown drew applause with a speech in which he said that ripping down the Wall demonstrated the power of the European idea. “I pledge here today that Britain will always be at the heart of Europe,” he said.

On the bridge there were many who had been persecuted, such as the Pastor Joachim Gauck, who went on to become the chief investigator and archivist of the crimes of the Stasi secret police. “The regime opened up the border because it thought it would let off some of the steam of protest and save itself,” Mr Gauck said. “They only succeeded in wiping themselves out and with them a whole empire.”

Among the old dissidents in attendance was Wolf Biermann, the protest singer, who had been expelled by the former East German authorities. The bulk of the crowd, though, was made up of ordinary people who crossed into the former western area on November 9.

“We come back every year,” said Herbert Mueller, 71. “My wife had made me goulash and dumplings, I could smell it and then the West German news came on and I almost fell off my chair — the Wall was open!”

They climbed into their Trabants and headed for the bridge. “There was a massive traffic jam and it took us three hours to get through — it was just a dream to drive through that monster of a bridge.”

Ms Merkel, at the time a 35-year-old research chemist, had heard a bulletin about the opening of the border but stuck to her routine of going to the sauna with a friend. Afterwards the two women drank a beer and Ms Merkel crossed into the former West Germany. She found herself in Wedding and was invited to tea by a family of strangers. It was a banal excursion and yet momentous.

Over the years Ms Merkel has become increasingly open about her eastern German background. In an interview yesterday she talked at length about her childhood: “I dreamt of the Beatles and of the outside world with all of its possibilities.”

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