Organized by the German, European Studies, History and Political Science departments, the symposium featured four speakers, a buffet lunch and a round-table discussion. These speakers covered a variety of topics, from the political implications of the event to firsthand accounts of life in East Germany. The organizers also set up exhibits in Frost Library, Keefe Campus Center and Porter House and had a table in Valentine Dining Hall, where they played footage of the fateful night of Nov. 9, 1989 and distributed free T-shirts as well as informational pamphlets.
According to Ute Brandes, the Georges Lurcy Professor of German who helped organize the symposium, the plan was initiated when the German Embassy contacted the College a year ago to propose the idea of a commemoration.
The symposium’s first speaker, Constanze Stelzenmüller, a Senior Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, intertwined the personal and the political in her speech about the fall of the Berlin Wall. As the child of a diplomat, she experienced the Cold War from diverse international angles, which she incorporated to her speech. The second speaker, Holger Teschke, Visiting Professor of Theatre at Mt. Holyoke College, discussed East German culture before and after the Wall, and William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science, provided a Soviet perspective to the event.
On the final day of the symposium, participants were invited to an authentic German lunch followed by a speech and documentary videos by Stefan Roloff and a round-table discussion with Brandes, Roloff and Teschke.
Brandes, who grew up in East Germany, told her personal story about her escape from the Communist regime and how the Wall divided her family.
“[For] the flight from East Germany to West via Berlin — the only free zone — we went in pairs,” she remembered. “My middle sister and I went together and we took the train to East Berlin. We would have to avoid the police on the train, who would recognize that we had a suitcase, so we left it in one compartment and went on. [We did the] same thing in East Berlin. We left it on the subway on one end and walked. Once we were in West Berlin, we went back and it was still there. It was pretty good! Three days later, we were flown out of West Berlin — Berlin was like an island in the middle of East Germany — and that way, we left it and didn’t return for a long time to East Berlin.”
However, one of Brandes’ sisters stayed behind in the East. One day, she woke up and could no longer leave. She did not see her parents again for 20 years.
“She was living in the East because it was cheaper and she was working in the West,” explained Brandes, “and then one Sunday morning, she was trapped. There was a wall and she could not go to work. She lived right next to the Wall and there was a watchtower that could look into one side of her apartment building where her bathroom and bedrooms were. She felt there was a curtain down all the time because she was watched all the time. My parents were not allowed — they didn’t dare — visit her. They had not seen each other for 20 years, and only when they got to be old enough that she was allowed out, she had to go back after two weeks.”
Stories similar to Brandes’ filled the symposium as the speakers remembered their own personal stories and the stories of family and friends as part of a historical event that is still very much in living memory. This personal aspect was what particularly struck and impressed German Language Assistant Markus Duerre.
“[The lectures] were very informative because they were from a personal view. Everybody knows what happened, but the insights from different perspectives were nice. That was something I never learned. I knew all the historical facts, but this personal perspective was pretty impressive.”
Like most of their German contemporaries, both Brandes and Duerre remember exactly where they were when the Wall came down.
“Twenty years ago, I was at a lecture in the Red Room, listening in, and there was a student who leaned over and said, ‘Professor Brandes. Guess what? The wall just fell,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Dream on!’ I was absolutely incredulous. It was something I knew, or I hoped, would happen within my lifetime, but certainly not immediately. That we were able to capture that and celebrate that was very important.”
Duerre was only four years old at the time, but the fall of the Wall was such a momentous occasion that it formed a lasting impression.
“I was at my grandparents’ house and we saw all this on the television,” he recalled. “The thing that I remembered is that from that day on, I decided that blue was my favorite color because I saw so many police cars and the lights in front of the Brandenburg Gate. I saw the picture of a lot of people at the gate and the Wall between the people. I was amazed how my parents were so excited and they were crying and laughing.”
Through the lectures, exhibits and buffet lunch, the organizers hoped to educate the College about the Wall, but also to celebrate the victory of freedom as Germany continues to heal its wounds and internal divisions.
“There is not a division, but we refer to East Germans and West Germans differently, so there is not complete equality,” Duerre explained. “It’s harder to get a job in the East. It’s not a division, but it will take time before everything really comes together. You can see where the Wall actually was in Berlin. There’s a marking in the pavement. That’s impressive when you stand there and you know that on one side was freedom and on the other side, there was not.”