On that cold night, they danced atop the wall, arms raised in victory, hands clasped in friendship and giddy hope. Years of separation and anxiety melted into the unbelievable reality of freedom and a future without border guards and secret police.

Germans are celebrating with concerts boasting Beethoven and Bon Jovi; a memorial service for the 136 people killed trying to cross over from 1961 to 1989; candle lightings; and 1,000 towering plastic dominoes to be placed along the wall's route and tipped over.

On Nov. 9, 1989, East Germans came in droves, riding their sputtering Trabant cars, motorcycles, and rickety bicycles. Hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands crossed over during the following days. Stores in West Berlin stayed open late, and banks gave out 100 deutsche marks in "welcome money," then worth about $50, to each East German visitor.

The party lasted four days. By Nov. 12, more than three million of East Germany's 16.6 million people had visited the West. Nearly a third went to West Berlin, while the others crossed through gates that opened up along the rest of the fenced, mined frontier that had cut their country in two.

Sections of the nearly 100 miles of wall were pulled down and knocked over. Tourists chiseled off chunks as souvenirs. Tearful families reunited. Strangers kissed and toasted one another with champagne.

Klaus-Hubert Fugger, a student at the Free University in West Berlin, was having drinks at a pub when people "who looked a bit different" began arriving. Customers bought the visitors round after round. By midnight, instead of going home, Fugger and three others took a taxi to the Brandenburg Gate, long a no-man's-land, and scaled the 12-foot wall with hundreds of others.

"Then the wall was crowded all over, thousands of people, and you couldn't move," said Fugger, now 43.

Angela Merkel, Germany's first chancellor from the former communist East, recalled the euphoria in an address last week to the U.S. Congress. "Where there was once only a dark wall, a door suddenly opened and we all walked through it - onto the streets, into the churches, across the borders," she said. "Everyone was given the chance to build something new, to make a difference, to venture a new beginning."

The wall the communists built at the height of the Cold War, which stood for 28 years, is mostly gone. Some parts still stand, at an outdoor art gallery or as part of an open-air museum. The wall's route through the city is now covered by streets, shopping centers, and apartment houses. The only reminders of it are a series of inlaid bricks that trace its path.

It all began with a routine late afternoon news conference that Nov. 9. Guenter Schabowski, a member of East Germany's ruling Politburo, casually declared that East Germans would be free to travel to the West immediately. Later, he tried to clarify his comments and said the new rules would take effect at midnight, but events moved faster as the word spread.

That night, around midnight, border guards swung open the gates. Through Checkpoint Charlie, down the Invalidenstrasse, across the Glienicke Bridge, scores of people streamed into West Berlin, unabated, unfettered, eyes agog.

At a ceremony in Berlin last month, Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who presided over the opening of the wall, stood with the superpower leaders of the time, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

After the decades of shame that followed the Nazi era, Kohl suggested, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of their country 11 months later gave Germans pride.

"We don't have many reasons in our history to be proud," said Kohl, now 79. But as chancellor, "I have nothing better, nothing to be more proud of, than German reunification."