Peter Verheyen grew up in Germany and was there in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was being chipped away 25 years ago.

Verheyen was part of a crowd that joined together for Tearing Down the Wall at SU on the lawn of Crouse College on Saturday. Hammers and saws in hand, the crowd tore down a symbolic art installation in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the wall.

Verheyen brought pieces of the actual Berlin Wall to the event and said the wall coming down was incredibly important for the history of Europe and the world.

“In today’s culture, if we look at the news now, whether it is things like Ebola or our southern border, we talk a lot about building walls, and I think it is more important to tear them down — whether they are physical or in our minds,” said Verheyen, who works as a librarian and research and emerging issues analyst at Bird Library.

The event was a part of Fall of the Wall Campus Weeks 2014, a campaign created by the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. to generate nationwide awareness of the 25th anniversary.

Jennifer Osias, a graduate student in the public diplomacy program, said tearing down the replica wall brought history alive and allowed Syracuse University students to interact with a time and place in history that many students were not alive to experience.

“There was a moment when I was on one side, and there was another person on the other side of the wall who was also hitting the wall to break through,” Osias said. “Feeling them hit, trying to get to my side and me trying to get to their side is how it must have felt for someone who hadn’t seen their brother, father, sister, mother in years and to know that they are on the other side — to feel that excitement. For a few moments, I understood how poignant that moment must have been for them.”

The wall, which stood for one week, was designed by Jonathan Louie, an assistant professor of architecture, and was constructed by students from the School of Architecture.

“My hope was, when we were designing it, to allow students and myself — although I am not a student — people who were not alive, to experience the visceral effects and immediate effects of the wall, to be able to, on some level, remember what it was like to have been in a time where the wall was up,” Louie said.

Throughout the week while the wall stood on the lawn, students were invited to write on the wall to express their feelings about the installation and the anniversary in the same way graffiti covered the original Berlin Wall nearly 30 years ago.

Mary Lovely, chair of the international relations department and an organizer of the event, said the wall generated a conversation about the national importance of freedom, issues of international migration and freedom of speech.

Lovely added that the wall also is also relevant to several aspects of the SU community, including academic curriculum and citywide issues.

“In Syracuse we are talking about Route 81. I know this seems like a strange comparison, but that is a division in our society and our community,” Lovely said. “Even though this is something that happened in the past that happened in a different country, thinking about these issues and what they mean to us personally or locally within Syracuse University is thinking about barriers across schools and colleges and how we break those down.”

Sponsored by a 25 Years Fall of the Berlin Wall grant, SU is one of roughly 50 universities in the United States participating in similar events around the country.

The campaign was executed on campus in collaboration with the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, the School of Architecture, the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the language, literature and linguistics department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

In addition to the symbolic construction and tearing down of the wall, lectures, film screenings and a digital story contest for SU students took place to create a discussion about the historic anniversary.

Maria Adebahr, First Secretary of the Political Affairs Department of the Embassy of Germany joined Karina von Tippelskirch, an assistant professor of the German department, in a “Why We Remember the Fall of the Berlin Wall” panel discussion before attending the tearing down of the wall.

“I am grateful and really surprised that (students) take so much interest in these kinds of events because it was 25 years ago,” Adebahr said. “You were born after World War II, why should this resonate with you? But it does and that is really good to see that (students) have devoted so much time and patience and just efforts into all of this. It is quite impressive.”

Published on October 27, 2014 at 12:01 am

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