The Wall Comes Down, 1989
Germans from both sides at the Brandenburg Gate in the days after the Berlin Wall was opened on 9 November 1989.
The opening was, in the end, an accident of a badly briefed press conference and a border guard who decided not to shoot. Within hours crowds were crossing freely; within a year the two German states had united. The Brandenburg Gate had stood in the death strip, reachable from neither side, which is why photographs taken on top of it carried so much weight. Read the full story in our article on The Fall of the Berlin Wall: End of an Era and the Dawn of German Unity.
CC BY-SA 3.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
