The University of Notre Dame will host a panel discussion and lecture Oct. 12 (Monday) to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (Nov. 9), celebrate two decades of freedom for the people of East Germany and of united Germany, and discuss what the East German Revolution meant to Germany, Europe and the world.
Sponsored by Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Henkels Lecture Series, the events are free and open to the public and will be held in the McKenna Hall auditorium.
A panel discussion titled “Comparative Perspectives on the East German Revolution of 1989” will be held at 4 p.m., led by J.D. Bindenagel, vice president for community, government and international affairs at DePaul University and formerly a U.S. ambassador who was serving as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, East Germany, when the wall came down. Notre Dame history professors Thomas Kselman, Semion Lyandres, Alexander Martin and Mikolaj Kunicki will serve as respondents.
Horst Teltschik, national security advisor to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1982 to 1990 and the principal architect of negotiations that led to the unification of Germany, will deliver the Distinguished European Lecture, “The Fall of the Wall and its Implications Twenty Years Later,” at 8 p.m.
Additional information is available on the Web at http://nanovic.nd.edu/events/2009/10/12/1430.