Why Roger Waters Staged ‘The Wall’ in Berlin in 1990

The most interesting thing about the 1990 Berlin production of “The Wall” is that it was never supposed to be a Pink Floyd reunion. Roger Waters was still smarting from the legal battles, so he went solo—and built a 550-foot-long, 82-foot-high wall across Potsdamer Platz, right where the actual Berlin Wall had divided the city just months earlier. The concert commemorated the fall of that wall, and Waters used the symbolic demolition of his wall (complete with falling foam bricks) to mirror the historical one.

It was a logistical monster: 200,000 people in attendance, a cast that included Sinéad O’Connor, The Scorpions, Cyndi Lauper, and a children’s choir from East Berlin. O’Connor famously refused to perform “Mother” because of a feud with Waters’ ex-wife, so he sang it himself. The show raised millions for the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, though Waters later admitted the whole thing felt “like a circus.” Still, it remains one of the most politically charged rock spectacles ever staged—proof that a 1979 album about alienation could land with crushing literal weight in 1990.