Angela Waters

Special for USA TODAY

BERLIN — The Berlin Wall actually brings back fond memories for Christian Heinz, who spent his childhood happily playing soccer with neighborhood boys using the 12-foot-high concrete barrier as a goal post.

"It wasn't something to be afraid of," said Heinz, 53. "If you were lost, you could just go to the wall, take a left, and you'd be at the next bus or underground station. The separation of Germany wasn't my problem."

Rahman Satti, 49, lived a mile away in East Berlin, where the wall cast an oppressive shadow over daily life.

"It was a feeling of pessimism," Satti remembered. "You felt sorry for yourself that you couldn't climb over the wall, touch the wall or go over to the other side. When you left the house, there was a policeman there guarding the wall."

Berliners such as Satti and Heinz reflected on their different experiences as their unified city on Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The city released about 8,000 illuminated balloons that had been placed along a 9-mile section where the 90-mile wall had encircled the western half of the city from 1961 to 1989.

As the balloons rose, an orchestra played Beethoven's Ode to Joyto note the euphoria that night when Germans broke the wall with hammers and chisels, a turning point in the country's postwar history. Spectators clapped and cheered as the balloons took flight and popped champagne — like 25 years ago.

Hours earlier German Chancellor Angela Merkel remembered the 138 people who died along the Berlin Wall and the countless others who suffered during its 28-year existence.

During the day, thousands visited landmarks of former East Berlin, placing flowers in the cracks of parts of the wall that remain and filling the streets around the famed Brandenburg Gate, where many had climbed the wall after the border opening was announced. They lit candles at memorials for victims, walked hand-in-hand to trace the path where the border once stood and read the markers detailing its stories.

"There was so much passion here tonight in the people," said Sabine Schrader, 64, a retired librarian from East Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate celebrations.

Schrader said she was crying while watching documentaries on TV Sunday about the wall and those who died trying to get across. "Then at 4 p.m. I had enough and came here to celebrate, to celebrate that it's over, the wall is really gone," she said.

For decades, the wall — built in the 1950s by East German officials allied with the Soviet Union — stopped a flood of East Germans from going to the West. East German officials brutally punished those who tried to escape the country.

The wall's days became numbered in the late 1980s, when then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed communist governments in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other Eastern bloc countries to relax their relations with the West. Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) eventually led East Germany to allow Czechs, Poles and others to emigrate to the West through its territory in September 1989.

Two months later, after East German dictator Erich Honecker was deposed and mass demonstrations by East Germans seeking the same freedoms as their neighbors were reaching a fever pitch, German Democratic Republic spokesman Günter Schabowski suggested during a news conference that the border with West Germany would be relaxed.

Schabowski's comments prompted sledgehammer-wielding citizens on both sides of the wall to begin dismantling the barrier. A year later, West Germany officially annexed the German Democratic Republic.

Today, a generation of post-unification Germans has reached adulthood. But Dirk Verheyen, a political scientist at Free University of Berlin, said he believes a lingering divide exists between East and West Germany.

"If you look at the 80 million Germans alive today, they came of age, experienced adulthood, during the time of division," Verheyen said. "The adult Germans who came of age during the Nazi period of WWII are declining, but it has only been 25 years since the fall of the wall. It isn't something that disappears overnight."

Felix Namuth, 49, from Hornburg in former West Germany, remembers that night 25 years ago: He was listening to the radio when he heard the wall was coming down.

"I jumped in the car and I came to Berlin alone," he said of Nov. 9. 1989. "I knew that it was the end of East Germany."

After the wall came down, Heinz found he had a lot in common with Easterners.

"Afterward, we saw that the differences between us and the East Germans were not so great," Heinz said. "The Berliners are all the same. They have a beer and a currywurst (sausage) and see what happens next."

Contributing: Luigi Serenelli in Berlin