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So-called socialist regimes in eastern Europe were nothing of the kind

Revolt swept across Eastern Europe 25 years ago, toppling the Berlin Wall and the Stalinists who built it. The real socialists were cheering, argues Tomáš Tengely-Evans

It was before the Berlin Wall fell and when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister that a Labour leader last spoke at the Durham Miner’s Gala.

Some 10,000 demonstrators encircled the banking sector of Frankfurt in Germany last Saturday. The atmosphere was exuberant. Another 8,000 took to the streets in Berlin.

Local government elections in Berlin last week brought a sensational result—the Pirate Party boarded parliament with 8.9 percent of the vote.

The Berlin Wall completely cut off the Western part of the German capital from the Eastern part and all of surrounding East Germany. It spanned 87 miles and was built in four stages.

The Berlin Wall was built 50 years ago this week, on 13 August 1961. For nearly 30 years, until its demolition in 1989, it served as a symbol of the division between the "free" West and the "Communist" East. The real story is a little more complicated.

The Lives of Others is a gripping thriller focusing on the role of the East German secret police – the notorious Stasi – in mid-1980s Berlin.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were widely hailed as the triumph of free market capitalism.

Wolfgang Fuetterer and Michelle Letowska have taken a series of photographs of what was formerly the "death strip" – the no man’s land between two parallel fortifications commonly known as the Berlin Wall.

In the summer of 1989, I stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin with my uncle. Looking at the Berlin Wall, he told me that it would be there forever. He couldn’t imagine a Berlin without it. Yet within a few months it was history.

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) betrayed the ideas it had fought for for over 50 years when it decided to support the slaughter of the First World War.

Eva, an ageing Jewish Holocaust survivor, who still lives in East Berlin, recounts the story of her life just after the Berlin Wall has fallen in 1990.

From Russia in 1905 to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 the 20th century was an era of revolutions. Yet the Russian Revolution of 1917 was the only one that was successful in putting the working class in power. What was different about the 1917 revolution?

Some 10,000 people marched in Berlin last Saturday against Germany’s role in the Afghanistan war.

Bauhaus photography in Leeds Joost Schmidt's "Still life with prism and seahorse" (courtesy of the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin) is an example of the pioneering experimental photography produced by the Bauhaus sculpture workshop in the 1920s and 1930s.

The recent German regional state elections in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern brought losses for the Left Party - the former East German Communist Party the PDS - and gains for the Nazi NPD party.

On 15 July 1892, Walter Benjamin was born into a well heeled assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. On 26 September 1940, he was interrupted in his escape to the US from Nazi Germany. Prevented from crossing from Occupied France into Spain, weakened by illness and threatened with being handed over to the Gestapo, he chose suicide.

GERMANY SAYS its biggest ever mobilisation for social justice and against cuts in social benefits took place on Saturday. More than 500,000 people, mostly workers, took to the streets-250,000 in the capital, Berlin, 120,000 in Cologne and 150,000 in Stuttgart. The German demonstrations were largely focused on the government of Gerhard Schršder, a coalition between the SPD (equivalent to the Labour Party in Britain) and the Greens.

In your area there may well be a longstanding Socialist Worker reader who has a video of the marvellous film about the Polish/German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. If so, borrow it. Among other outstanding scenes is one where Rosa Luxemburg's friends implore her to leave Berlin as the forerunners of the Nazi stormtroopers hunt her down.

DEMONSTRATIONS took place in Germany on Saturday against government plans to cut unemployment and other welfare benefits. The government wants to make it easier for bosses to sack workers. Over 10,000 marched in Berlin. The protests came as strikes in key sectors hotted up over a demand to cut working hours.

A POLITICAL explosion reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall is shaking Cyprus. It has the potential to overcome the tragic division of the island's people along ethnic lines-Turks in a state in the north, Greeks in the south. It could also challenge Greece and Turkey, which, along with former colonial power Britain, have fostered those divisions.

A GREAT crash shook the British labour movement last week-one that sounded almost like the fall of the Berlin Wall back in November 1989. Derek Simpson's election as general secretary of the engineering and electrical section of the giant Amicus union is more than the latest in a series of left wing union victories.

MASS protests greeted US president George W Bush as he began his tour of Europe last week. Over 100,000 people demonstrated in the German capital, Berlin, on Tuesday. The following day 50,000 marched.