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Title Happy Event
Setter The Tall'n
Series The Listener
Number 3540
Date 13/11/1999
Grid Not available; please help if you can.
Preamble Banners and garlands are hung to celebrate the anniversary of an historic event.
Answers along banners overlap, but each letter is clued only once: clues give definitions in order, plus wordplay indications of all the letters along the banner. Banners cross the "keyhole" and include letters in the numbered "peg-holes", whereas garlands do not. Each garland clue is two non-overlapping normal clues to the numbered pair in either order; garlands are hung around the peg-holes, the garlands in each pair being hung in opposite directions.
Three lines of poetry are included because, although written two hundred years earlier, they express in an appropriate language the impact (actual and symbolic) of the event. The subject of the poem and the first two lines are in the clockwise perimeter, starting in the top left square. Unclued garlands 11 and 17 (three words) give the historical context of the event, and the banners A and P can be arranged to announce REDS DEMO UNDID A WIDE FREEZE. Solvers should highlight the next line of the poem and the event itself.
Solution Notes
(Hide Solution)		In November 1989, the Berlin Wall Was Opened (the event to be highlighted around the keyhole), part of what President Mitterand of France described as "these happy events" and the sign that the COLD WAR was ENDING (garlands 11 and 17).
The perimeter of the diagram spells out FREUDE and two lines from Schiller's An Die Freude (Ode to Joy, 1785): "Deine Zauber binden wieder Was die Mode streng geteilt". The letters at the centres of the garlands, to be highlighted by the solver, spell out the line ALLE MENSCHEN WERDEN BRUDER. An English translation of these words is:
"Joy ...
Your charms reunite
What common use has harshly divided:
All men become brothers."
KeywordsNovember 1989 the Berlin Wall Opened President Mitterand these happy events COLD WAR FREUDE Schiller An Die Freude Ode to Joy 1785 Deine Zauber binden wieder Was die Mode streng geteilt Joy Your charms reunite What common use has harshly divided All men become brothers
Acknowledgements Preamble and solution notes © 2024 The Times. Reproduced with permission.
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