Germany commemorates start of anti-communist protests

Europe News

Oct 9, 2009, 11:28 GMT

Leipzig, Germany - Germany commemorated Friday the street demonstrations which led to the fall of the communist East German state 20 years ago, inaugurating a monument in the eastern city of Leipzig. The core demonstrators prayed in a Leipzig church on October 9, 1989, then marched in a throng that swelled to 70,000, demanding democracy. In the 'Miracle of Leipzig,' watching police and army battalions did not stop them. A month later, the Berlin Wall fell. The monument, an egg-shaped, gold-coloured bell, symbolizing the start of new life, was placed in a pedestrian zone close to the Nikolaikirche, the baroque inner-city church where Lutheran activists nursed the seeds of protest. Officials were disappointed when the computer-controlled Liberty Bell failed to ring for the first time as planned on Friday. It is meant to ring an random intervals, but was supposed to sound during the inaugural ceremony. 'It must be a software bug,' said Walter Christian Steinbach, head of Leipzig's Culture Foundation. In the nearby Gewandhaus theatre, the home of orchestral music in the city, German President Horst Koehler thanked veterans of the protests, telling them, 'You can be eternally proud of that day.' East Germany's Communist Party apparently contemplated shooting the demonstrators, as China had done to protesters on Tiananmen Square in Beijing four months earlier, but held back from that step. A new democratic leadership took over East Germany and reunified it with Federal Germany the following year, 1990.

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