CJ Day – Staff Writer
On a brisk and windy Saturday morning, students hammer sheets of plywood together.
The sound of nails hitting wood fills the air, as the crew laughs and jokes. The wind catches a corner of the plywood, but someone grabs it before it gets too far.
“I bet the Soviets weren’t as jolly building their Berlin Wall,” said Rebecca Steele, a German professor and the orchestrator of this project.
To remember the fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years ago, German department faculty members will be hosting events and demonstrations about the Wall throughout the week. To help students better visualize the Wall, they’ve built a replica out of plywood which will be gradually graffitied all this week, and finally destroyed Oct. 4, when anyone visiting can take a sledgehammer to the replica.
“A lot of students we teach, I don’t think they really know the importance of the Berlin Wall,” said Steele. “This is a thing that happened 30 years ago, and that’s before most of you guys were even thought of, so we’re trying to tell people what happened.”
Events this week will allow students the opportunity to interact with eyewitnesses to the events of 1989. Steele said it was important to ground the events in the reality of those who experienced it, so that it feels more real for students.
Mark Person has been teaching German for the last three decades. He taught in Germany while it was still divided into East and West, and he lived in the country during the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification.
He said the challenges of teaching German to American students have changed since he started.
“When I started out, we weren’t very far removed from World War Two, and so there was still this perception of Germany as mostly Nazis,” he said. “Nowadays, that’s mostly changed, and there’s more of a genuine interest in German culture.”
Person said German culture underwent a massive shift after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and students cannot understand modern-day German culture without first understanding the ramifications of reunification.
“If you don’t participate, you’re not getting a robust view of the culture you’re trying to learn more about,” said Joseph Nelson, a student minoring in German who helped to build the replica wall. “You’re robbing yourself of these experiences you could have had.”
Just an hour after the group brought the Wall to its resting place on Prexy’s Pasture, it was already covered in graffiti, from messages of solidarity in German to a crudely-drawn hammer and sickle. The wall will be destroyed Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and anyone can listen to eyewitness accounts, grab a hammer, and join in the destruction.
