The Wall – Live in Berlin council meeting, and felt they needed some kind of an event to focus attention on it… So I agreed to have a meeting with Leonard Cheshire. And I was very impressed, and said I would do what I could, although I thought it was very unlikely that it would come off… Then, in November [1989], when the wall started coming down, we started negotiating." The show had a sell-out crowd of over 350,000 people. Right before the performance started the gates were opened which enabled at least another 100,000 people to watch. While this broke records for a paid-entry concert,
Free University of Berlin committee appealed to the public for support. The municipal authorities of Berlin granted the foundation of a free university and requested the opening for the coming winter semester 1948/49. Meanwhile, the students committee in the German Democratic Republic protested against the formation, the GDR described the new university as the "so-called free university" in official documents until the fall of the Berlin Wall. The council-manager government accepted the by-law on 4 November 1948. The by-law achieved prominence under its alias ""the Berlin model"": The university was founded as a statutory corporation ("Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts") and was not directly subjected