35 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, echoes of east-west division linger

The wall, which separated East and West Germany, stood for 28 years before it was torn down in 1989.

Transcript

00:0035 years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, reuniting Germans who were divided between East and

00:06West for nearly three decades.

00:09As Berliners poured through holes in the concrete to reach the other side, the iron curtain

00:14that separated Russia from the Western allies was shattered.

00:17But since then, the separation has come back, driven by Russian President Vladimir Putin

00:22and his dreams.

00:24He calls the loss of the other countries that then became independent as the greatest trauma

00:32and tragedy of the Russian history.

00:35So there you can already see that in his world, in his ideology, he would love to have this

00:42separation again.

00:46And I'm guessing for him, it's about separation, but also just about the complete power over

00:53people in a military way, but also in an economic way, and just, yeah.

01:01Less than a thousand kilometers east of Berlin, at the border of Europe, new walls are being

01:07built.

01:08Poland is fortifying its border with Belarus to stop illegal migrants who, according to

01:14Warsaw, are being used by Belarus and Moscow to destabilize the West.

01:21I would just have wished that Poland could have come up with another way, because the

01:28symbol of building a wall again, of splitting Europe apart, basically, and that's what it

01:33is in the end, it's just not the right sign of where we should go as Europe, as a European

01:40community, because it's a humanitarian catastrophe for the refugees, for the migrants that are

01:46stuck there in the forest with no infrastructure, no food, no humanitarian aid whatsoever.

01:55This year, people in the German capital will celebrate the fall of the wall with the slogan

02:00Uphold Freedom.

02:02But being free to move from country to country is a privilege that many do not have.

02:10But it's not just European borders that separate the East from the West.

02:15Countries from within the EU have been strengthening external borders, and with anti-migrant rhetoric

02:20continuing to rise, the question stands if walls will always be there to separate people.

02:26Liv Stroud, in Berlin, for Euronews.