&fsTwenty years ago Monday, the world watched in awe as the Berlin Wall, a physical barrier between East and West Germany, came tumbling down amidst eased travel restrictions between the two.

News coverage of the Berlin Wall from Newseum

Prior to its fall, the wall, which split Berlin for more than a quarter of a century, represented both a physical and metaphorical boundary between the Eastern and Western civilizations; capitalism and democracy versus communism — all the trappings of the Cold War.

To raise awareness and celebrate the anniversary, the ISU German Club will erect a wall in front of Parks Library from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and have spray paint available for any passersby to draw on the wall.

Chelsea Joslyn, president of the ISU German Club and senior in German, said this is the first year the club has sponsored an event of this scale.

“With the 20th anniversary, we wanted to do something big,” Joslyn said. “This was a huge milestone for the German culture. It had an impact on the entire Western world, and it was a way for a lot of people living in Eastern Germany to get integrated back with Western Germany.”

After students have painted the wall all day, members of the German Club plan to tear the wall down.

Mark Looney, lecturer in world languages and cultures, said the fall of the wall was a harbinger for a fundamental shift in the way the rest of the world interacted with the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

“I was raised in an Air Force family,” Looney said, “and I remember when I was growing up one of the sort of typical put-downs was you’d call someone a ‘commie,’ and now it is sort of like no one understands that insult. I also have a different appreciation than, maybe, my parents, who were born at the end of the second World War and their whole lives really revolved around this perception of the world that saw the Iron Curtain as that sort of divide between two worlds.”

For both Americans living in Germany and the Germans themselves, the fall of the wall came as a surprise.

There had been rumblings of discontent in the weeks prior to the fall. Many saw political strife as the status quo, said Tom Klobucar, lecturer in political science.

“The date that it happened, I remember, it was weird because as I drove home, I drove through Frankfurt, and downtown people were kind of just wandering around in the streets, almost like they didn’t know what to do,” Klobucar said. “I think it’s safe to say that if anybody saw it coming, they might have seen it coming the day before, but nobody predicted this. We thought the wall was kind of a permanent fixture, that it was going to be there forever.”

Part of this reaction, Klobucar said, could be attributed to the perceived failure of Western efforts to appeal to East Germans through radio broadcasts and other forms of information designed to counter Soviet propaganda about the Western world.

“You know, after you’ve been doing it since the 1950s and it’s now the 1980s and it doesn’t appear to have any effect, we assumed it’s probably not going to work,” Klobucar said. “Nobody really believed that anything we were doing was making a difference, and you know, it still could be that nothing we did made a difference.”

Even if the Germans weren’t expecting a sudden reunification, it didn’t damper the jubilant celebration immediately following the fall.

Klobucar, who had been living in Germany for about eight years prior to the fall, said he and his wife and had just moved to Frankfurt from Berlin.

“We went home and flipped on a German television station and it was quite a phenomenon to watch,” Klobucar said. “The almost insanely festive atmosphere — without reservation. It was almost like Oktoberfest and every other German holiday rolled up into one. It was enormous, an almost universal celebration on the part of the people.”

While the initial shock and revelry of the fall stayed with the Germans for a long time the difficult process of reunification eventually sunk in and the sharp social, economic and political divides between the two halves of the country began to take their toles.

While East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic as it was known in the Soviet Union, was one of the most economically viable territories under Soviet control, it was relatively impoverished when compared to West Germany.

“They were living with infrastructure that had been created by the German government in World War II,” Klobucar said. “Reality sunk in and reality was higher taxes for the West Germans, the reality was the East Germans trying to immigrate to West Germany and then kinda moving back and forth and trying to find out how they fit into this new Federal Republic of Germany and then there was this resentment on the part of the West Germans.”

Some of those things persist today.

The strength of Western Germany’s economy was able to buoy the Eastern German economy, but it exacerbated social and political tensions between the two.

“The term Ostie [easterner] became a derogatory term,” Klobucar said.

Part of the tension between the two had to do with an Eastern German integration into the Western German capitalist market.

“You saw after the wall fell, a lot of western corporations went in and bought up and retooled or shut down factories,” Looney said. “These small companies had been protected by communism and hadn’t been exposed to free market capitalism and they couldn’t keep up. Of course there was a lot of resentment there.”

Looney said a lot of East German goods produced during the communist era, goods that had become icons of the country, got lost in the shuffle to streamline manufacturing.

“It’s because a lot of it was just seen as being backward or behind in the times,” Looney said. “But if you look at that as a metaphor for the mental landscape of the people at the time it makes sense that there would be these social struggles.”

While Germany was struggling to reunite its two halves into one cohesive country, many Americans experienced a renewed interest in German culture.

Mark Rectanus, professor and chairman of the world languages and cultures department, was teaching at Iowa State when the wall came down.

He said there was a sharp jump in the number of students taking German language classes.

“That was true nationally. There was a real upswing in interest in German classes and also in political science,” Rectanus said. “There were a lot of students who where engaged and very interested in what was going on Germany and what was happening in Germany politically.”

Rectanus said the significance of the fall extended far beyond its repercussions for Germany.

“It meant the end of the Cold War — not completely, but symbolically, it meant the end of the war and this cloud that people lived under with nuclear confrontation had diminished significantly,” Rectanus said. “You know, there was still some threat, but it wasn’t like at the height of the Cold War, and just seeing this physical thing come down and people being able to move again was huge.”

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, less than two years after the Berlin Wall fell, and Klobucar said that while the reunification of Berlin was a catalyst for further social movements that led to the collapse

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, head of the USSR from 1988 until its collapse, was trying to distance communism from its persona of being cold and separate from the people, Klobucar said.

“He was trying to put a human face on it,” Klobucar said. “There had been the solidarity movement in Poland, which was building up long before Gorbachev showed up, and there was also some dissonant activity in the East German military. He didn’t put any pressure on them, so these events started to take place and things started to snowball. The Berlin Wall was a symbol and a catalyst at the same time that basically tells people ‘You know what, this is OK. This happened and nobody got hurt.’”

Rectanus said the relative ease with which the wall came down was part of why the event was so surprising.

“The overwhelming spirit was that it had happened peacefully, and people never thought that if it had happen it would happen peacefully,” he said.

Video series on the Berlin Wall from The Guardian

For many Germans, that peaceful reuniting of the two sides meant a lot more than political and economical reunification, it was the first time they were able to see family and friends since the wall had gone up almost overnight in 1961.

Michael Cook, social chairman of the German Club and junior in German and history , said a lot of family members on his mother’s side came from Germany.

“I remember hearing about it a lot as a little kid, and I don’t remember the wall falling, I was two, but right after the reunification I remember my mom talking about it, and I met my aunt for the first time,” Cook said. “People here have a hard time understanding the impact, the very idea of actually building a wall to block people off in your own country is, well, you can’t really wrap your head around it.”

For more information about the events up to and surrounding the collapse check out the following recommendations from German enthusiasts.

Movies:

“Goodbye Lenin”

“The Wall: The Making and Breaking of the Berlin Wall”

“Ghosts of the Berlin Wall”

Books:

“The Fall of the Berlin Wall” by William F. Buckley Jr

“Der Mauerspringer” by Peter Schneider

“The Berlin Wall” by Frederick Taylor

— Information from sources interviewed.