SAIS Marks Fall of the Berlin Wall The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 held special significance for the SAIS community in Washington, D.C. A slice of the wall, which once divided East Germany from West Germany, stands in the Nitze Building Courtyard, where SAIS students walk past it every day. It was bequeathed to SAIS and The Johns Hopkins University American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in 1997 by the Berlin Senate. Then-German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel dedicated the iconic piece as a tribute to “the success of the German-American partnership and as a symbol of the peaceful end of the Cold War.” To prepare for the anniversary, SAIS’s German Club spent several weeks organizing the construction of a model of the Berlin Wall in the Nitze Courtyard. They hosted a weeklong speaker series, “Walls Still to Fall,” featuring “open mic” sessions every day at lunch time, where students and guests were encouraged to sign the “wall” and address those present about barriers to freedom around the world. Invited guest speakers included Azar Nafisi, executive director of SAIS Cultural Conversations, and Markus Meckel, former minister of foreign affairs for the German Democratic Republic. On November 9, students tore down the wall and celebrated in the courtyard. SAIS has also hosted events on the topic throughout the semester. The Russian and Eurasian Studies Program welcomed Archie Brown, professor emeritus of politics at Oxford University, who spoke November 3 on “The Fall of the Wall and the Fall of Communism: Why—and Why 1989?” On October 27, John McLaughlin B’66, ’66, former acting director of the CIA and senior research fellow at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, shared memories with the SAIS New York Alumni Club of working for the agency in the months preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Erik Jones B’89, ’90, Ph.D. ’96, professor of European Studies at the Bologna Center, reflected on where he was when the wall came down: I remember getting a call from my best friend and classmate at SAIS in D.C., Chris Boege [B’89, ’90]. I was sitting in my basement, blissfully unaware, but he was watching it on TV. I immediately hopped on my bike and rode over to his house. I wanted to watch it with him because he had met a girl from East Berlin during the student trip to Poland the previous summer. They had fallen in love and were deeply depressed that the wall would keep them apart—Chris was on a watch list in East Germany for some work he had done with expellees in the West German Parliament. Once we saw the wall coming down, we knew they could be together. I got to his house just in time for him to catch her on the phone. The connection was bad, and he was speaking loudly over the TV and the static about how happy he was that they would soon be together. They were married at the end of the academic year. Twenty years later, from his vantage point at the Bologna Center, Jones said the fall of the wall and the end of the Cold War had a dramatic impact on the student population of the center. As conditions stabilized and improved in Central and Eastern Europe, the student population began to represent ever wider parts of the globe. This unique diversity was celebrated on June 6 at the annual Amici di Bologna (Friends of Bologna) event, where a group of U.S.-based alumni met at U.N. headquarters in New York City and listened to a panel discussion on “Twenty Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” This was also the theme of the Bologna Center’s annual Alumni Weekend in May, attended by 200 alumni, representing 25 countries. ● [return to contents] | 
