''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, the Faculty Development Council at the University of Cincinnati, and the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Chicago

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.

All events, free and open to the public, will be held in Tangeman University Center

Keynote Speakers:

Sander L. Gilman: "Sex and the City: Thoughts on Literature, Gender, and Normalization in the New Germany" (Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Emory University); Josef Joffe: "20 Years Later: Which Way did the Wall Fall?" (Founding editor and publisher of Die Zeit, Hamburg; Political Science, Stanford University); Saskia Sassen: "Global 1989?" (Sociology, Columbia University); James Sheehan: “Twenty Years After: Three Questions about the End of the Cold War” (History, Stanford University)