anniversaries
On the College Green, remembering the grim era of the Berlin Wall: “All is going better, but nothing is going well.” Credit: Aaron Wee / Brown University

World without walls

In a scholarly acknowledgment of the historic fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, Brown’s German department organized five days of events examining the end of Communist dominance in Eastern Europe. 
By Aaron Wee ’10  |  November 17, 2009  |  Email to a friend

On a mild autumn Monday, a crowd gathered on the College Green and, in less than an hour, built a wall. The group was marking the 20th anniversary of the fall, on November 9, 1989, of a more divisive obstacle – the Berlin Wall, which had separated democratic Germany from Communist East Germany from 1961 to 1989.

Those assembled – students, faculty, and community members – wrote messages of hope and freedom on the symbolic Brown wall, then took part in a spoken-word competition on the importance and meaning of freedom.

Finally, they grabbed hammers and pummeled the wall into shreds, celebrating the peaceful reunification of Germany.

Senior Lecturer Jane Sokolosky commented that she hoped the event would “teach students that walls can be brought down without violence.”

Organized by the Department of German Studies, the re-creation of the Berlin Wall and its demise was the culmination of a week-long commemoration of the end of the Cold War’s most prominent symbol. The programming included talks and seminars on East-West issues; a lecture by Consul General Reiner Möckelmann, a retired West German diplomat and director of the Wust Summer School (cofounded by German studies professor Kay Goodman), a screening of the 2003 film Goodbye Lenin! – a comedy about a German son who hides the news of the wall’s destruction from his mother because he fears the shock might kill her – and a semiformal “Freedom Without Walls” gala.