Clinton Oversees Unveiling of Berlin's Diva

President John F Kennedy came to Berlin to declare himself a Berliner. President Ronald Reagan came to Berlin to demand that its Wall be torn down.

Last night, Bill Clinton came to the city for what was billed as the world's biggest-ever unzipping.

On the 12th anniversary of German reunification, a stunt artist abseiled 18 metres down the Brandenburg Gate - known to locals as "the diva" - pulling a zip to lay bare a monument that has been two years in the restoration.

A gate that Berliners had come to accept as grisly grey and scabrous glowed smooth and genially golden in the floodlights.

Its restorers had filled in some 100,000 bullet holes left by the 1945 battle for Berlin as they inched their way across reunified Germany's most iconic structure, using lasers to strip it of more than two centuries of filth and soot.

Monserrat Caballe, resplendently Wagnerian, sang from a platform raised high in front of the gate's 12 Doric columns.

The city council estimated that 750,000 people - a quarter of the population - gathered to watch the unveiling. But then it would be hard to overstate the Brandenburg Gate's emblematic importance for the new Germany.

Standing just metres from the line between east and west Berlin in the cold war, it was a symbol of the country's ideological division. Yet, on the night in 1989 when the Wall fell, it was transformed into the backdrop for its awesomely sudden reunification.

In his speech immediately before the unveiling, Mr Clinton called the gate a "doorway to our common humanity".

In another remark that will have gone down well with his hosts, he described Germany as a "genuine friend of my country". Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was standing nearby, has been struggling to improve relations with Washington since being re-elected last month on a pledge to stay out of any invasion of Iraq.

Yesterday's festivities yielded signs of a thaw. President Bush, who pointedly ignored Mr Schröder's re-election, sent a warm letter to President Johannes Rau to mark the anniversary.

"The German and American people have ties that date back to the establishment of our nation. Over the past half century, those bonds were deepened by a shared commitment to democratic values", German officials quoted the US president as saying.

President Bush noted that millions of Americans had lived in Germany since 1945 as soldiers, students and businessmen.

"Their friendships with Germans and fond memories of their experiences form a strong basis for facing the new challenge ahead," he added.

Mr Schröder's coordinator for US policy, Karsten Voigt, said: "American expectations that Germany would be a close ally after 1990 are still being fulfilled and will continue to be valid."