Twenty years on...

World leaders joined thousands of people to mark 20 years since the Berlin Wall's fall, an event that paved the way for the end of the Cold War.
Celebrations at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate - the symbol of German reunification in 1990 – included the toppling of giant dominoes to show how Communist governments fell one after another in 1989.
Communist East Germany built the 155km (96-mile) wall around West Berlin in 1961, to stop East Germans fleeing to the capitalist enclave. It was finally opened on 09 November 1989, after unprecedented mass rallies.
Berlin remembers fall of the Wall

The demise of the Berlin Wall was a remarkable political event of the Twentieth century, a symbol of the collapse of the "Iron Curtain" - the fall of Communism throughout the USSR and eastern Europe. The end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Wall (and the release of Nelson Mandela in the following year), it really felt back then that we were on the verge of a brave new world.