Brilliance! What better way to honor the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall than to build a wall to block everyone out of the "free" celebration!? The terrible beauty of pure hypocrisy is a blinding light.

Fans planning to catch a glimpse Thursday of U2's free concert celebrating 20 years since the monumental fall of the Berlin Wall are largely out of luck after organizers threw up a barrier to block the view for those without tickets. The move has enraged everyone on hand with a sharp enough mind to see the irony in building wall around a concert dedicated to the wall that has come down.

"It's completely ridiculous that they are blocking the view," said Louis-Pierre Boily, 23, who said he came to Berlin even though he failed to get tickets. "I thought it's a free show, but MTV probably wants people to watch it on TV to get their ratings up," said Boily, a native of Quebec City. He was among several hundred people who gathered Thursday against the roughly 12-foot (2-meter) metal fence, draped with a white tarp that blocked off the view of the stage from the street. Why not just have the party on the Mexican border instead? It would look roughly the same.

10,000 tickets were made available online for the free U2 show, but they vanished in minutes. Roughly 100,000 people - ten times the amount of tickets provided - are expected to show for the concert. 

"It's a shame that a barrier has been set up. It's stopping many Berliners from hearing the concert," local politician Frank Henkel told the BBC.

The Berlin Wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, symbolically ending almost 30 years of Cold War division between the communist East and the democratic West.

In 1988, as musicians including Pink Floyd and Michael Jackson performed in a three-day "Berlin Rock Marathon" on the western side of the concrete barrier, concertgoers in the West threw rocks, bottles and firebombs at the wall, while some 2,000 youths gathered on the eastern side to listen, many shouting "The wall must go."