By Robert Nisbet, Europe Correspondent
Germany will mark today's 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall by releasing 8,000 balloons along a nine-mile stretch of the former concrete frontier.
The lit balloons will be untethered at 7.18pm local time, to celebrate the moment the first East Germans started to clamber across the divide into the west on Thursday 9 November, 1989.
The wall was built around West Berlin in 1961 by the German Democratic Republic, which called it the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart".
The Wall's main purpose, however, was to prevent defections to the west.
In its 28-year history, the Berlin Wall became a potent symbol of the Cold War with its watchtowers and so-called "death-strip" where an estimated 5,000 people risked their lives to escape the hardline regime.
But cracks started to appear in the imposing edifice when mainly bloodless revolutions in Poland and Hungary heralded the loosening of communism's grip in eastern Europe.
The pursuit of the policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the precursor to these historic events.
The 83-year-old is in Berlin to join the commemoration ceremonies which include a concert at the Brandenburg Gate and the reopening of a museum dedicated to the Wall.
But Mr Gorbachev has warned that the world has failed to learn the lessons from the bitter enmity which divided Europe after World War Two.
Referring to the current stand off between the west and Russia's Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, he said: "The world is on the brink of a new Cold War. Some are even saying that it's already begun."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was born in Hamburg but grew up in the east, will lead today's events by making a speech at the Berlin Wall Memorial.
She has spoken in the past about the significance of the Wall's collapse to every German citizen.
"Even today when I walk through the Brandenburg Gate, there's a residual feeling that this wasn't possible for many years of my life, and that I had to wait 35 years to have this feeling of freedom," Mrs Merkel said last week.
"That changed my life," she added.
German unification took almost a year to complete after the Wall fell and since then an estimated two trillion euros has been spent on trying to level the playing field.
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Gallery: 25 Years Since The Berlin Wall Fell
West Berlin policemen and East German Volkspolizei face each other across the border in Berlin, circa 1955
1961: Soldiers build the Berlin Wall, as instructed by the East German authorities, in order to strengthen the existing barriers dividing East and West Berlin
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