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“Peaceful Revolution and German Unification” is the title of a new exhibition created by the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany.
The film is set in 1989, when a strict border was drawn across Germany, dividing Eastern and Western Europe, and in 1989, when millions of people from the former East Germany (GDR), Poland, Hungary, and other Eastern European countries It records how they fought for freedom and democracy.
Since the exhibition is targeted at a young audience, it was first presented at the Heinrich Hertz Middle School in Berlin. Students were conducting additional research on exhibits documenting Cold War history as experienced first-hand by their parents and grandparents.
Photos, short texts, and QR codes linking to additional videos appear on a large display indicating important dates. One of them is his November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell. In another case, on February 19 of the same year, 20-year-old Chris Geffroy became the last person to be shot and killed by East German border guards as he tried to flee from East Berlin to West Berlin.
Students learning about recent history
Jon Zenner, a 17-year-old student, said he only really understood the partition of Germany after studying the material presented at the exhibition. “We had very few conversations about this topic at home,” he says. Mr. Zenner’s father is from West Germany and his mother is from Hong Kong.
Zener and his classmate Mara Böhme, 16, put on their final exhibition entitled “Youth of a United Germany.”
The 2019 Shell Youth Survey found that “the differences between East and West, male and female young people, and between young people with and without foreign roots are getting smaller, not bigger.”
Boehme says these findings are true. “In our generation, we felt that there were no longer any big differences between young people in East and West Germany, and this exhibition has made that clearer.”
Zenner and Boehme agree that the exhibition is very suitable as a basis for discussion in politics and history classes. “I think this kind of exhibition makes more sense than, say, showing it on smartphones,” Boehme says. She says students have short attention spans when doing things on their phones. “So I don’t think people pay much attention to it. When it’s displayed like this, it draws more attention.”
Alexander Buchholz, who teaches history and politics, was impressed with the effort his students put into their presentations. “They had great ideas,” he said. We found that students were also keen to seek out more information to better understand developments over the years.
Lecturers at the Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany are pleased with the positive response to their latest educational project. The foundation’s president, Anna Kaminski, said she recognizes that the topic seems far-fetched to today’s generation of students, adding, “But it’s the very thing their parents taught them from an early age. It’s something I remember.”
“Peaceful Revolution” in Eastern Europe
This also applies to people in other countries who fought for freedom in the 1980s. One of his posters for the exhibition is titled “Eastern and Central Europe Frees Itself”. On this wall are written the words of Lech Walesa, a Polish dissident at the time. “The first wall to fall was demolished at the Gdańsk shipyard in 1980. Then it was the turn of the symbolic wall, and it was only in 1980 that the Germans demolished the real wall” in Berlin. “
Mr. Walesa was chairman of the Solidarity trade union in communist Poland from 1980 to 1990, and then became the first elected president of democratic Poland, serving as president from 1990 to 1995. In recognition of his contribution to freedom and democracy, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The exhibition “Peaceful Revolution and German Unification” marks 35 years since the upheaval in Germany and Europe, and comes at a time when Russia is violently turning back the clock on its war against Ukraine. It also comes at a time when European democracies are under attack from right-wing extremists. The exhibition is part of an ongoing public debate about the future of democracy.
More than 500 schools, libraries and archives have already ordered compact poster sets for display. This includes inquiries from France, the UK and the US. The exhibit is available in German, English and French, but other language versions can be produced on request.
This article was originally written in German.
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