Sunday, November 08, 2009
News

When the wall came down

UGA remembers fall of Berlin Wall

Remembrance of the Demolition of the Berlin Wall
Monday, Nov. 9 at 4:30 p.m.
Lobby of Joseph Brown Hall
University of Georgia
Athens, Ga.
For more information visit
www.gsstudies.uga.edu


BY COLBY DUNN

When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago, it was the domino that knocked down the rest of the complex maze of communism. It fell without a shot being fired—with a party rather than a bang, as one news blogger has put it—and changed the face of politics and the world.

Nov. 9, 1989 was a defining day for our era, one that many remember well. But 20 years on, most university students studying its effects have no such memories. Some were not yet born.

That's why the University of Georgia’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, in conjunction with other on-campus groups like Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE), an arts-research initiative, is currently holding a commemorative symposium that started Nov. 5 and ends on the 11th.

"You know, a lot of the students here at the university were born right about the time of, or after, the revolutions in Eastern Europe or the fall of the Berlin Wall," says Martin Kagel, head of the department and one of the lead organizers of the event. "We think that students and the larger community should be aware of this."

The symposium features roundtable discussions on the fall of European communism with leading university professors, as well as screenings of films that speak to the issues facing former Soviet-bloc countries, including 1996's Oscar-winning Czech film “Kolya” and the wry Romanian comedy “12:08 East of Bucharest.” An 11-foot replica of a section of the Berlin Wall is also on display, and stations where students can post their observations on the fall and its aftermath dot the campus.

"I remember vividly watching this on television and how important these events were, and how moving," says Keith Langston, coordinator of the Russian language program at UGA and another event organizer, who was doing graduate studies in Slavic languages when the wall came down. “But the students we have today were born after 1989. They don't remember, and we wanted to do something to remember the anniversary and also introduce students to the political issues."

According to Kagel, those political issues are still alive and well, and beg attention.

"Here, Americans, they tend to idealize the situation very much," says Kagel, who was a student living in West Berlin at the time of the fall and moved into the East Berlin shortly thereafter.

When the wall fell, he explains, it was the dam breaking on a massive lake of capitalism and modern convenience that inundated not only East Germany, but the rest of Eastern Europe.

"There was an enormous amount of trash all over the street—couches, refrigerators and television sets—because people wanted to replace the old things they had," says Kagel of East Berlin shortly after the fall. "They yearned for material wealth. There was no socialist idealism left. They just wanted to live the life that West Germans had lived for the last four decades."

Many East Germans wanted their communist occupiers gone, and managed to boot them out without a military conflict. But in the intervening two decades, the initial jubilation has abated. The situation there is still complex, and a certain homesickness, or what is affectionately called “Ostalgia” by Berliners—“ost” is German for “east”—persists. As the global recession continues, enchantment with the promise of prosperity from the West has taken a beating. Yet there is one message that still rings true.

"We want people to understand, I guess, to some extent that people have the power to resist unjust political systems," says Langston, "and that the people sometimes win.” SP