Cultural Perspective on the Wall

Yesterday we went to the Ohio State University in Columbus, the capital city of Ohio. We saw there an exhibit that discussed the fall of the Berlin wall. This exhibit was created by German students of the University of Paderborn. They wanted to take pictures out of certain perspectives. They had old pictures that showed Berlin many years ago when the Berlin wall existed, and they wanted to compare it to the new look of Berlin. I liked some of the pictures because the students taking them had partly very good ideas, but I have to say that too many pictures were taken out of the position of a tourist going through Berlin, so these pictures were nothing special.

There were only pictures in this exhibit with small texts, so you learned hardly anything about Berlin, the Berlin wall, or the cold war. Partly you were able to feel the atmosphere of this chapter in the German history. Most of the exhibits in Germany use fewer pictures. They use pictures only to virtualize certain things they are talking about in the texts next to them. Here it’s the other way around. The texts just explain what the picture means and wants to say, so there was rather less content in this exhibit if you compare it to other exhibits.

Everybody knows about the international effects of the fall of the Berlin wall. It meant the end of the cold war, so the end of 50 year-long fear about WWIII. I think that it’s important to remind people of this chapter of history. People should learn about it so that they do everything against a new cold war or something like that. Another important thing is that no country should be split into parts again. After 20 years of reunited Germany, there are still some differences in economics between the former 2 parts, but there are no other differences between East and West. There are still many prejudices about the people from the eastern or western part of Germany. For example, many people from the East think that people from the West are vain, and people from the West think that everybody from the East is either a Neo-Nazi or a Communist. It’s just crazy because there is no western part and no eastern part of Germany. There is just the Federal Republic of Germany.

Sebastian