But for some Germans it also summons memories of the East Germany that was a state of informers and suspicions, public rigidity and private despair — none more so than the families and friends of those killed at the Berlin Wall, for whom the anniversary of its fall is tarnished by tragedy, pocked with the holes where a child, a spouse or sibling once was.
To trace the victims is to delve behind the glamour and groove that is modern Berlin, deep into meticulously neat gardens and homes where most Germans live their ordered lives.
The pain still sears, more than five decades after the first victims died, and a quarter-century after millions of German families divided by the Cold War came back together.
By far the majority of those killed trying to breach the fortified, 96-mile barrier were young men in their teens or 20s.
Many more were tempted to take the risk in the first years than toward the end.
Contrary to myths of heroism and betrayal attached variously by West and East to each escape, few who fled or tried to had a purely political motive.
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