Ambassador Scharioth Congratulates Winners of Freedom Without Walls Speech and Art Competitions
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- Ambassador Klaus Scharioth congratulates Elaine Kelley, a master's student at Georgetown who took fourth place in the German Embassy's "Freedom Without Walls" speech competition.
- (© German Embassy Washington)
German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth has congratulated the winners of two nationwide contests in which college students delivered speeches and created works of art that dealt with the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Andrew Salmon, a student at the University of Virginia, won first place in the art competition. Robert Cannon, a student at California State University Long Beach, took first place in the public speaking competition. Both will receive the grand prize, a trip for two to Berlin.
Ambassador Scharioth personally congratulated fourth place winner in the speech competition, Elaine Kelley. Kelley is a student in the Master's program at Georgetown University's BMW Center for German and European Studies, where she is focusing on public diplomacy. She has lived and studied in Germany as a participant in the Congress Bundestag Youth Exchange and during a junior year abroad at the University of Trier.
The competitions were part of the Freedom Without Walls campaign to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On over thirty college campuses across the US, students and faculty organized the preliminary competitions as well as lectures, film screenings, discussions and more.
A jury of German Embassy staff then selected the top five in each category from among the campus winners. The winning artworks range from mixed media sculptures to vivid graffiti, and the winning speeches range from explorations of the historical context of the fall of the wall to impassioned statements on current political issues that divide American society.
