Two German professors went back in time and talked about how they perceived the German reunification as children to kick off German Campus Week on Oct. 19.
In 1945 at the end of WWII, East and West Germany were split, creating a divide that was one of the more prominent symbols of the Cold War. Forty-five years later in 1990, the Cold War ended, and the two halves of the country unified.
German assistant professor Nicola Schmerbeck was a child living in West Germany during the time of the divide.
Schmerbeck said she remembers growing up in a military town. She didn't realize the severity of the situation, but she felt like the war and divide would last forever.
“When I was young, I didn’t really understand the divide,” Schmerbeck said. “I remember learning in school that we were in the middle of a Cold War, but to me, as a kid, all that meant was we would continue to have regular drills.”
Schmerbeck said she used to sit at the dinner table and listen to the radio talk about people fleeing the country after the Communist Party took over in East Germany in the late 1980s.
“I remember ... my parents saying that those people were so stupid,” Schmerbeck said. “My father thought this because he believed they were going to close the border completely, not allowing any Germans to go to the West from the East.”
The summer of 1989 was when the wall between East and West was torn down. Schmerbeck remembers the day: she was at home alone while her parents were out with friends. For an 11-year-old, the best part about being home alone was watching whatever you wanted on TV, Schmerbeck said.
“When I turned on the TV, there were all these reports on every channel about the wall coming down,” Schmerbeck said. “I was too upset that my shows kept getting interrupted, so I switched off the TV and went to bed. My dad was shocked that I just overslept the revolution.”
After the wall was torn down, the county was left in a state of euphoria, Schmerbeck said. Their shock was followed by constant conversation on the topic, and Schmerbeck said the country overall felt a sense of happiness and unity.
German assistant professor Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers, a child of German immigrants that came to the U.S. after WWII, was a high school student in the United States at the end of the divide.
“The first year I started learning German from the Western perspective in high school, the wall fell,” Schreiber-Byers said. “The second year, the country was unified.”
Schreiber-Byers said the day the wall fell, videos of people tearing down the wall were found on news stations all night long.
“I was in school, and when I came home and learned about the wall on the news, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’” Schreiber-Byers said. “This was so exciting for me, especially within my German class, because this meant we were going to take a break from learning German and actually focus on what all of this actually was.”
Unlike the constant party that took place in Germany after the unification, Schreiber-Byers said the story was something she only heard about among other things on the nightly news. It wasn’t as big of a deal in the U.S., but it was still present, she said.
“So, the question back then, and even today, is what do Americans care about the unification of Eastern and Western Germany?” Schreiber-Byers said. “This unity ended a war that [America] was a part of.”
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