Miami Student

Issue date: 11/6/09 Section: Campus

The mock Berlin Wall built by an architecture class stands near Slantwalk (Scott Allison / The Miami Student).

The Havighurst Center at Miami University is celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall with a series of events.

Faculty and students have been working to make this a success and remember the history of the Berlin Wall, including having Josef Joffe, publisher of German newspaper Die Zeit, speak to Miami students Nov. 9.

Joffe is also a professor of political science at Stanford, concentrating on U.S. foreign policy, international security policy, European-American relations, and Europe and Germany. His lecture entitled "Twenty Years Later: Which Way Did the Wall Fall?" will take place at 12:30 p.m. Nov. 9 in 212 MacMillan Hall.

"We like to think that the fall was a victory for the west but he will be talking about how the burden from taking care of all people from the east changed Berlin politically, economically and socially," said Karen Dawisha, director of the Havighurst Center. "His argument will be a very controversial one. It will be good for Miami students to go because in the United States we are used to thinking about the 20th century as the American Century. But the 21st century is showing itself to have a lot of challenges perhaps we should have foreseen: a lot of economic challenges, political challenges and military challenges. It is good to think about these events in quite different terms."

Architecture students are working to build their own version of the Berlin Wall and symbolize what it did to the country and the people.

"The great thing about this semester is that there is a lot of opportunities for students to access information about the Berlin wall, there's not just one," Dawisha said. "There are a lot of opportunities to get involved."

The architecture students are involved in rebuilding the wall and later simulating its fall by tearing it down. The wall will be continued to be built throughout all of November and be dismantled on Dec. 1, the date of the complete fall of the Berlin Wall.

"We are hoping it conveys a message of rise and fall," said Joshua Carson, a junior architecture student working on the project. "Our generation mostly sees the side of graffiti on the wall. It's not just a wall that fell that was in the way. It changed a lot."

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