Behind Dr Gabriele Gauler, a confused and tense crowd stands frozen. Young, old they stand, perch and clamber onto a graffiti-covered wall lit by harsh floodlights on a dark night. The crowd is nervous, unsure of whether to believe the explosive news: East and West Berlin would no longer be divided.
'For Germany it was a lucky end,' says Gauler, the new director of the German Goethe-Institut in Hong Kong, gesturing at the photo of that historic night in November 1989 when the Berlin wall came down. 'Nobody could expect this.'
Yesterday Germany's reunited capital marked the 50th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall started to go up with a memorial service and a minute of silence in memory of those who died trying to flee to the West.
In Hong Kong, the Goethe-Institut, a non-profit German cultural body, is showing the exhibition 'Scenes and Traces of a Fall', bringing together the works of eight photographers who documented the breakdown and gradual disappearance.
They show the wall as it was - imposing and deadly. The drama of its last days - the media circus, politicians' speeches and its demise - being torn and hammered down by ordinary people. And finally, the few traces that remain now of the greatest symbols of a divided Europe after the second world war.
The Wall was born in the early hours of Sunday August 13, 1961, to stop the exodus of East Germans fleeing the Soviet-occupied East.
