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Wall Exhibit Rededicated on Anniversary
On the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Chargé D’Affaires a.i. of the German Embassy Peter Gottwald took part in a rededication ceremony of an exhibit of the Freedom Forum’s Newseum that features the largest display of Berlin Wall segments outside Germany. Germany’s Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service (Stasi) of the Former GDR was the keynote speaker at a Freedom Forum luncheon following the rededication ceremony.
The outdoor exhibit at Freedom Park in Arlington, Virginia, allows visitors to view up close both faces of the Wall – one decorated with colorful graffiti and the other side blank concrete – as well as a once ominous GDR watchtower. The tower was a gift to the Freedom Forum from the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin and its director, Rainer Hildebrandt. Once the Newseum reopens in its new location near Capitol Hill in 2007, the Berlin Wall exhibit will be featured prominently there.
With renditions of “Free at Last” and “Ode to Joy,” the high school and elementary school choirs of the German School Washington brought a festive tone to the ceremony on November 9. At the rededication, Gottwald recalled learning of the events of November 9, 1989, while in Washington during a previous tour working in the Political section of the German Embassy. He was was busy with issues of arms control and disarmament when news of people flooding across border checkpoints in Berlin seemed to come from out of the blue. Along with the happy pictures coming out of Berlin, there was uncertainty about what might come next, Gottwald said. “Of course, I would have loved to have been Berlin then, but the second best place to be was here at the Embassy in Washington because we were part of the action,” he said. “Germans do know – and we in Washington experienced it – that without the leadership and determination of the United States, this positive and peaceful result could not have happened. For this we are eternally grateful to President George Bush and his administration who together with Helmut Kohl and of course, our other Western partners were able to achieve this outcome” of German unification.
Glyn Davies, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs in the State Department, joined Gottwald in delivering remarks at the ceremony. He recalled that the Wall was not just a cement barrier, but also a “killing ground” that included armed guards, trenches, shrapnel devices, towers and bunkers. “Today it exists in pieces all over the world, a memorial to what people and nations can achieve when motivated by that most powerful of impulses – the innate drive for freedom,” Davies said.
Commissioner Birthler, herself part of the East German citizen’s movement that helped bring about the Fall of the Wall, spoke of the mixed emotions of hope and disappointment expressed by German citizens over the past 15 years. She also poignantly recalled growing up in East Berlin and listening each Sunday to the ringing of the Liberty Bell – Berlin’s not Philadelphia’s. The US had donated a copy of the Liberty Bell to the citizens of Berlin to commemorate the end of the Airlift. Each Sunday, RIAS, the American radio station in West Berlin, broadcast the ringing of the bell. Birthler quoted from the “oath of liberty,” which was broadcast along with the ringing of the bell: “ ‘I believe that all men derive the right to freedom equally from God. I pledge to resist aggression and tyranny wherever they appear on earth.’ To hear such words in Berlin, behind the Wall, could keep people hopeful and could give them the feeling to be connected with people all over the world. I’ll never forget it.”
Tens of thousands of people have viewed the exhibit since it opened in September 1999 in Freedom Park, which celebrates the spirit of freedom and the struggle to preserve it and includes the Journalists Memorial. Officials expect millions of people a year to see the Berlin Wall exhibit beginning in 2007 at the Newseum’s new location in Washington. To accompany the Wall exhibit, the Freedom Forum has produced a new 20-minute documentary about the role of the news media over the decades of division between East and West and in the Fall of the Wall in 1989. November 10, 2004 * Photos courtesy the Freedom Forum Links
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