“Freedom Without Walls” Brings New Perspectives to Georgetown
December 15, 2009
As the rhythms of techno music reverberated at club night in the German Embassy on November 13th, Georgetown students from the United States, Germany and around the world sipped German wine and beer, laughed, danced, and discussed everything from international politics to homework. The closing party was the capstone of “Freedom Without Walls,” a week of events on the Georgetown University campus that were all geared to remember the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9th, 1989. The city of Berlin had been split in two since the socialist government decided to build the wall in 1961. The wall fell in 1989 when mass protests and other political forces forced a regime change.
A joint, U.S.-wide initiative of the German Embassy and the German Information Center to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall, “Freedom Without Walls” at Georgetown included a replica of a section of the Berlin wall, speeches by students, visits by distinguished speakers, and the club night. “We wanted to put our own imprint on the project,” said Astrid Weigert, professor of German in the college. With its location in the capital and its focus on international exchange “this would be the place for the project to be,” said Weigert. “We wanted to be the showcase, and the embassy agreed.”
Weigert, who headed up the project at Georgetown, was particularly interested that American students got the sense of what it meant to live in a divided place. Since most undergraduates were very young or not yet born when the Berlin wall fell, the German department knew that it was important to bring historical context of the Berlin wall to the campus community. “It’s not because [students] forget—it’s because they don’t know,” said Weigert. “We want to provoke questions like ‘how was life under the communist regime?’ They can go to all sorts of classes at Georgetown to ask these questions.”
The intention of the event was not just to reach and inform German students or students already involved in the German department, but to educate everyone on campus. “We [were trying] to connect young Americans with the perspectives of young Germans,” explained Weigert. “To make it more real [was] the ultimate purpose of the week’s events.”
To give the physical impression of the Berlin wall, a replica section was built November 6th on Red Square on campus. Passersby were invited to write messages on the replica, which ranged from notes about walls in Israel and along the Mexico-US border, to signatures and comments in various languages about the fall of the Berlin wall. The point of the wall was “to show people what it was like…the strength of this edifice, how it can really wall you in,” said Weigert, who also noted that it is often hard for students to grasp the sheer strength of the structure which was rimmed with barbed wire, patrolled by attack dogs and manned by soldiers ready to shoot anyone who attempted to climb over the wall into East Berlin. Students have already taken away lessons from the “Freedom Without Walls” project.
“Without fail—[students] said this is a lesson to the world, that physical walls will not last forever,” noted Weigert. “The solution has to come from the people themselves, not necessarily the politicians. It was the deeds of the ordinary citizen that caused the fall of the Berlin wall.”
Katharina von Farber-Castell, a senior in the college from Munich, Germany who was one of the student event organizers, seconds that sentiment. “‘Freedom Without Walls’ is very important generally because it symbolizes the great triumphs in world history and will always relate to the notion and importance of human freedom,” she explains. “The wall was not torn down by any army or government officials, but by the German people [who] demanded their liberation from an extremely oppressive political system. These citizens proved that any wall or border can be broken in the hope for a better future.”
The full campus was invited to all of the events, and those studying in the German department were also able to participate in a speech competition on November 10th. The speeches were written and delivered in German. “It was important to us to have an academic component,” noted Weigert. The German Embassy was running a contest for the speeches, and she was confident Georgetown students would show well.
“We integrated [the ‘Freedom Without Walls’ project] into the courses,” noted professor of German Peter Pfeiffer. “The speech competition was an important part of the unit that was developed in the advanced German courses. I think that distinguishes what we’re doing here. It speaks to a commitment to foreign language study and the integration of language study; it’s what we stand for. We might be the only one of the participating universities that did the speeches in German.”
Not only were students involved with an academic component through the speech competition, but also several distinguished academics—including former president of the university Father Leo Donovan and former Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany Hans-Dietrich Genscher—spoke at Georgetown to mark the occasion. Pfeiffer arranged for noted German writer Peter Schneider, one of the most well known authors working on the issues of the Berlin wall, to give a talk at Georgetown on November 12th. Schneider wrote a book, published in 1984, titled “The Walljumper.” “[It was] one of the few books that took the wall seriously, and to understand what it meant to divide the two countries,” said Pfeiffer. “Schneider was part of the student protest movement, so it was unusual to address an issue that was at the time an issue more conservative politicians would raise. That made him well known, and he has written about Berlin and the wall many times.” Schneider has written other books, including “Couplings” (1996) which centers on relationships of pre-unification Berliners and “Eduard’s Homecoming” (2000) about Germans in Berlin after the fall of the wall. His perspective of the events of the fall of the Berlin wall give fresh perspective to students trying to fully grasp the events surrounding the fall of the wall.
For Karl Javellana Nguyen, a junior in the college, the benefits of having a project like “Freedom Without Walls” on campus were clear: “To promote awareness for those who only know about the Fall of Berlin Wall as a collective historical memory. To promote awareness of the impact of the wall that was the focal point of the world politics in the second half of 20th century. To [celebrate] the triumph of freedom of the people against a totalitarian state.”
