German Approaches to Remembering the Berlin Wall, 1989-2019

The history and meaning of the Berlin Wall remain controversial, even three decades after its fall. Drawing on an extensive range of archival sources and interviews, Dr. Hope Harrison’s new book profiles key memory activists who have fought to commemorate the history of the Berlin Wall and examines their role in the creation of a new German national narrative. With victims, perpetrators and heroes, the Berlin Wall has joined the Holocaust as an essential part of German collective memory. Key Wall anniversaries have become signposts marking German views of the past, its relevance to the present, and the complicated project of defining German national identity. Dr. Harrison’s work considers multiple German approaches to remembering the Wall via memorials, trials, public ceremonies, films, and music and also traces how global memory of the Wall has impacted German memory policy.

Join AGI for the third seminar in a series on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Hope Harrison received her bachelor’s degree in Social Studies from Harvard University and obtained her master’s and doctorate degrees in Political Science from Columbia University, including a Certificate from the Harriman Institute. She taught at Brandeis University and Lafayette College where she was an assistant professor. Dr. Harrison has held research fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin, the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, the Davis Center and the Belfer Center at Harvard University, the Institute of Europe in Moscow, the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany, and the Free University of Berlin. In 2009-2010, she had a Fulbright Fellowship in Berlin at the German Federal Foundation for Reappraising the East German Communist Past, and in 2013-2014, she held a Wilson Center Fellowship with the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. As an expert on the Cold War, Germany, and Russia, Dr. Harrison has been a featured expert on CNN, C-SPAN, the BBC, the History Channel, Deutschlandradio, Deutschlandfunk, Spiegel-TV, Voice of America (in Russia), NTV (Russia), and elsewhere. She has been invited to give lectures in the U.S., Canada, Russia, China, and throughout Europe. She has directed the Elliott School’s Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (2005-2009) and the Program on Conducting Archival Research (2001-2011). She has also served as the chair of the advisory council of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center (2008-2012).

Dr. Harrison is a Senior Fellow with the History and Public Policy Program as well as the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Council on Germany, the American Institute for Contemporary Germany Studies, and the Atlantik Brücke. In Berlin, she is a member of the Berlin Wall Memorial Association, the international advisory board of the Allied Museum, and the governing board of the Cold War Center Museum in Berlin.