German Celebration

On the day when two German football teams - Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund - face each other at Wembley in the final of the Champions' League, it is fitting to note that I have just accepted my invitation to another German event at least as worthy of celebration: the 100th anniversary of my old local Metzer Eck in Berlin in the hands of the same family.
Anyone who has read my semi-autobiographical 1989: The Berlin Wall (My part in its Downfall) will know that this is the pub I first ventured into in 1989 as a young correspondent on the wrong (eastern) side of the infamous wall, was made to feel at home and where I met (and heard the secrets of) many people who would become my friends for decades. Then run by Bärbel Falkner (whose parents had first move in during August 1913) and her partner Alex Margan, it was later taken over by her genial son Horst and (after his sad early death from cancer) continues admirably under his wonderful widow Sylvia.
Unlike so many British pubs which have been messed about with and undergone repeated changes of ownership under the years, this little Berlin corner local (Eck means corner and the pub is on the corner of Metzer Strasse and Strassburger Strasse in what was once East Berlin's derelict, now fashionable Prenzlauer Berg district) has remained totally unchanged for most of a century.
During that time it has undergone 4  changes fo regime, from the Kaiser to the Weimar Republic to Nazi dictatorship to Russian occupation and the East German Stasi state to modern unified democratic Germany, and as many changes of currency from the old inflation-crippled Papiermark to the Reichsmark, the Mark der DDR, the D-Mark and finally the Euro. Not to Brits paranoid about the slightest change to their currency it has done well - and continues to do well - under all of them.
Prost Metzer Eck!