''November 9, 1989''—The Fall of the Berlin Wall, Twenty Years After
November 8-9, 2009 / University of Cincinnati / Cincinnati, Ohio

Sponsored by the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund, the University Research Council, and the Faculty Development Council at the University of Cincinnati

On November 9, 1989, the East German party functionary Günter Schabowski announced the official “opening” of the Berlin Wall for travel purposes; one day later, on November 10, East Berliners ventured out en masse into West Berlin.  As an historic event, the fall of the Wall marked the presumed “end” of the Cold War and “death” of communism. In its wake the world witnessed the dissolution of the USSR; a shift in Soviet policy toward glasnost’ (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring); the so-called Autumn Revolutions of 1989 throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria; the reunification of East and West Germany one year later in 1990; and rapid geopolitical and global capitalist restructuring. Our conference will examine the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the subsequent international political, economic, geographic, and cultural transformations over the past twenty years.

Keynote Speakers:

Sander L. Gilman (Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Emory University); Josef Joffe (Founding editor and publisher of Die Zeit, Hamburg; Political Science, Stanford University); Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia University); James Sheehan (History, Stanford University) 

Contact Katharina Gerstenberger or Jana Evans Braziel with questions.