Festivities are in full swing in Berlin as people come together to mark 25 years since the Wall came down.<br /><br />Eight thousand helium balloons were lit up along a 15-kilometre stretch of the barrier that divided Berliners for nearly three decades.<br /><br />At the former Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the crowd.<br /><br />The ex-Soviet leader has recently warned Western leaders and Russian President Vladimir Putin against dragging the world into a new version of the Cold War he helped to end a quarter of a century ago.<br /><br />His “Perestroika” and “Glasnost” reforms set in motion changes across communist eastern Europe that led to the Wall’s demise. <br /><br />Earlier on Friday, the German parliament kicked off the weekend’s commemorations with a special ceremony in the Bundestag.<br /><br />The parliament’s President, Norbert Lammert, said the wall’s demise was the culmination of many acts of protest across the former communist states of eastern Europe.<br /><br />“It was not a miracle, any more than a natural phenomenon. Rather it was the result of a peaceful revolution which was unprecedented in German history, which sped from one event to the next at a breathtaking pace over several months,” Lammert told the chamber.<br /><br />Singer, poet and former East German opposition member Wolf Biermann broke with parliamentary protocol by performing his protest song “Encouragement” on his guitar.<br /><br />The artist, who was expelled from the ex-GDR in 1976 and stripped of his East German citizenship, said the song had comforted dissidents locked up under the old communist government.<br /><br />Controversially, he attacked the modern far-left Die Linke party, which was formed out of East Germany’s former ruling communists, as remnants of the old regime.<br /><br />The commemorations continue in Berlin over the weekend.
