Past
Thierry Noir, one of the first artists to paint on the Berlin Wall, joined Justinian Jampol, director of The Wende Museum, in a conversation about his experiences in Berlin as he painted the Wall in the 1980s and his plans for the segments of the Wall in Los Angeles.
Support provided by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles
The Wende Museum and German Historical Institute presented a three-day international conference, bringing together more than 30 scholars, journalists and observers from throughout Europe and the U.S. to question the role of “things,” namely objects of material culture and their importance for the understanding of German history, since the Wende era in 1989 and 1990. The conference papers focused on three areas of research: 1) the function of things in everyday life of East and West Germans; 2) the history of culture as an instrument of power; and 3) contemporary museum practices as indicators of the politics of writing about and visualizing history.
In conjunction with the Wall Project, The Wende Museum's civic commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, former U.S. Ambassador to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Richard Barkley, Consul Michael Ott and dramaturge Uta Schorlemmer discussed the dramatic events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent final days of the GDR. Richard Barkley served as the last American Ambassador to the GDR from 1988 to 1990, before the reunification of Germany. Michael Ott is Consul of Cultural Affairs for the General Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Los Angeles. Uta Schorlemmer is the daughter of the famous Wittenberg pastor and dissident in GDR, Frederick Schorlemmer.
Moderated by Gregory Rodriguez, Irvine Senior Fellow and director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation. Support provided by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, UCLA.
This multi-day film series, organized in collaboration with DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, focused on films made just as the Berlin Wall collapsed and East Germany began to crumble. It showcased thirteen feature films and five documentaries made by the last generation of filmmakers trained in the German Democratic Republic.