BERLIN - -- Germany's capital warmed up Sunday for the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall with celebrations throughout the city, as crowds gathered to relive the ecstatic scenes that heralded the demise of European communism.

Leaders from across the continent were due in the German capital to join around 100,000 people Monday at the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of national unity since the peaceful revolution that tore down the wall in 1989.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday used the anniversary as a rallying cry for a new U.S.-European push to free those oppressed by religious extremism.

"Our history did not end the night the wall came down," Clinton told current and former European and U.S. officials in a keynote speech hosted by the Atlantic Alliance. "It began anew."

Clinton said German Chancellor Angela Merkel's scheduled walk Monday through the heart of once-divided Berlin is a moment that "should be a call to action, not just a commemoration of past actions."

"We need to form an even stronger partnership to bring down the walls of the 21st century and to confront those who hide behind them: the suicide bombers, those who murder and maim girls whose only wish is to go to school," Clinton said.

Merkel, who will host leaders including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, recalled that the fall of the wall Nov. 9, 1989, came as an utter surprise.

Germans were out in force along the former route of the barrier, inspecting 1,000 giant dominoes that will be toppled as part of Monday's ceremony.

Mayor Klaus Wowereit said the project, in which children were among those to decorate the foam tiles, had helped underline the day's importance for those too young to remember it.





Agence France-Presse, November 9, 2009