Consul General gives opening speech at Florida Atlantic University's conference "1989 Revisited: Lessons from Two Decades of Democratic Transition in Eastern and Central Europe"
Florida Atlantic University's College of Arts and Letters - Peace Studies in Boca Raton organised a three day conference "1989 Revisited: Lessons from Two Decades of Democratic Transition in Eastern and Central Europe". At this conference scholars from the US and European countries discuss the lessons to be learnt from the events in 1989. The conference is accompanied by a series of movie shows, including the German films "Goodbye Lenin" and the Academy Award winning "The Lives of Others". In his opening speech Consul General Klaus Ranner put the Fall of the Berlin Wall and its 20th anniversary into the context of the civic freedom movements in Poland, Hungary and the then Czechoslovakia, the Helsinki process and the German Ostpolitik of the early Seventies of last century and reminded of the concept of freedom created by these movements still valid today.
