Mental Photos of Divided Germany   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 120       MENTAL PHOTOS OF DIVIDED GERMANY An Interview with Dr. Richard E. Schade on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall Dr. Richard E. Schade, Emeritus Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati, completed his graduate studies at the University of Marburg (M.A. 1968) and at Yale University (Ph.D. 1976). In the years between those degrees, he served in the United States Army as a Military Counterintelligence officer (1969–72) with service in Germany along the East/West German divide. Dr. Schade’s academic research focuses largely on German and Neo-Latin literary culture from Luther to Goethe. In addition, he was the Managing Editor of the Lessing Yearbook from 1986 to 2012 and a long-time member of the editorial board of the German Quarterly. In recent years, his research has engaged the literary and artistic work of Günter Grass, seeking to define the creative symbiosis between those arts. Dr. Schade’s career has often taken him to Berlin -- as an undergraduate in 1964 to repeated visits guiding students there. As luck would have it, he was in Berlin in November 1989. As Honorary Consul of Germany in Cincinnati (1996–2012), he secured a segment of the Berlin Wall for installation in the city. For this and other accomplishments he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany. On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, Matthew Bauman sat down with Dr. Schade to discuss his involvement with commemoration events around Cincinnati as well as to record his reflections on and experiences of pre- and post-unification Germany. Highlights from their nearly two-hour conversation appear below. OCUS: The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati commemorated the twenty fifth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall on November ninth, 2014 with a program of speeches as well as a ceremony at the segment of the Berlin Wall located in front of the Center. How did you understand your role in shaping and organizing the proceedings? RES: There was a program committee at the Underground Railroad Museum Freedom Center, a Smithsonian affiliate in downtown Cincinnati, and I would call myself the intellectual force of the committee vis-a-vis the fall of the Wall, having had considerable experience in Berlin even before the fall ... from 1964 on. Most of the members didn't have that background, so I saw it as my responsibility to bring them up to speed. The thought was to have a keynote speaker for the event that was ancillary to Campus Weeks, the public diplomacy outreach of the German Embassy at the German Embassy in DC. I suggested that William Howard Taft IV be invited for two reasons: 1) I went F   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 121       to secondary school with him in New Hampshire, so I know him quite well, 2) he was at the time of the Fall of the Wall, the US Ambassador to NATO in the George H.W. Bush administration. At the Freedom Center event, I gave a very short speech titled "Remembering the Berlin Wall," in which I outlined my 'relationship' to the Wall over time – to include during my military service as military counter- intelligence operative. Consul General Herbert Quelle from Chicago had been Ambassador to Azerbaijan and he presented his perspectives on the effect of the Fall as a diplomat in a territory of the former Soviet Union. Taft's remarks were particularly interesting, since he 'corrected' the celebratory agenda, by opining that the current status of freedom in the world was not that rosy – Arab Spring, Ukraine, a viewpoint well documented by his position in a DC NGO, The Freedom House, an institution founded by Eleanor Roosevelt back when. The event concluded with a wreath-laying at the Berlin Wall segment outside the Freedom Center. By the way, I came up with the idea of acquiring a segment in 2008. In May 2009, my wife, Heike, and I selected it, and then arrangements were made for transportation to Cincinnati with a subsequent installation and dedication on 3 July 2010.1 In the planning stage, there was a discussion was to whether there should be an honor guard at the laying of the wreath, and I said – and the committee members came to agree with me – that I did not want to have the segment re-militarized, as it were. The celebration was publicized widely on radio, TV and on the Net. Taft and I were interviewed at length on the local NPR station, for example. The PR effort attracted a crowd of some 500 persons – actually, maybe they came just to snack on the Berliner, those typical Berlin jelly donuts, each of which was decorated with a small German flag. What one doesn't do for Germany, for Berlin – "Berlin bleibt Berlin!" as they say. FOCUS: Beyond your involvement with the Freedom Center event, The University of Cincinnati is exhibiting photographs that you took of the Wall during the events of November 1989.2 What is the story behind those pictures, and how do they reflect your understanding of and relationship to the Wall? RES: I had been assigned by the Dean – I was department chair of [the University of Cincinnati Department of] Germanic Languages and Literatures – to sign a linkage agreement with the LMU [Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität] in München. I did that, and it happened to be in November of 1989. And while I was there, the Wall fell. I had built in a couple of days on the trip for my own uses, so I went directly to Berlin and was there for all of twenty-four hours. But there is one thing I will never forget: I got off the U- Bahn at Kochstraße – that’s Checkpoint Charlie – and walked the Wall from there to the Brandenburger Tor, which is about two kilometers, maybe three, photographing the Wall. This was shortly after the Wall had fallen. Checkpoint Charlie of course was still operating because it was still East Berlin. The Brandenburg Gate, you couldn’t go through it. When I was there the first opening of the Wall that was actually made by the engineers of Ost-Berlin was at Potsdamer Platz and I saw that opening. Potsdamer Platz, of course, was in no man’s land. Even on the West Berlin side there were just one or two buildings there. But what I did is, I photographed the Wall. And I didn’t photograph crowd scenes; I was more interested   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 122       in the Wall as text. And if I were to say this, I would say the Wall was essentially a variegated, complex, cacophonic statement of ideas and puns and little admissions of love and strident political statements, and as you walked the Wall it was like a scroll or passing by a piece of celluloid film. The message was what you made of it, what you focused on, and the message I made of it in my photography – which was decidedly amateur – was my interpretation of what the Wall said. It reflected my interests. A person photographing after me would have probably focused on other details – his or her reading of this “text;” that’s what I call the Wall. What I liked about the surface of the Wall when I photographed it: There was absolutely no respect by the spray-can painters for the works of others. And it’s that lack of respect which is part of the agenda, the creative impetus almost: I’m going to say what I think; I’m going to contradict what you say; I’ll spray over what you say. They’re not doing it consciously probably, but it’s a layering of the text, too, if you think of it. Not only are the words and images separate from one another, but they’re interlocked in that way. And I find that really fascinating. The textual Wall was, of course, the Western flank of the Wall. The Eastern flank was a blank page; it was painted white. And then probably the greatest event that I experienced there was, number one, seeing the Potsdamer Platz opening with people coming through from the East. And by that time the people who were chipping away at the Wall had created holes in the Wall. They were always created where the two segments joined one another, because the surface was hardened concrete and you could gain purchase on the rim, and then slowly that would be chiseled out. First of all, I took some photos through those, and then on one occasion, I reached my arm through to feel the East Berlin side and I went like this [motioning] to the right and felt the flank, then I went to the left, and I grabbed a soft, human shoulder with an epaulette on it. In other words, there was an East German Volkspolizist right there watching these arms come through the Wall. I was quite surprised. I think he was probably surprised, although this was kind of his game. Of course I couldn’t see him, and unexpectedly he turned his face toward me and looked through the opening and smiled and disappeared. I couldn’t photograph him. That one moment, I just couldn’t photograph him. It happened so fast, but that’s indelibly in my mind – a mental photo, if you will. On my photography expedition, I also went into East Berlin, to the Museum for German History, located in the same building as it is now. The exhibits were in accord with a Marxist interpretation of history, and I consciously went through the galleries to look for the display for the years from when the Wall was built until 1989. There was a yellow tape across the door, and on that tape hung a little sign saying Photograph by Richard Schade, 1989   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 123       “wegen Renovierung geschlossen,” which really expressed exactly what the issue was: History had to be completely reconsidered because of the Fall of the Wall. And that happened – that was in November ‘89, right after the Wall fell. I think I was there around the twelfth or the thirteenth. FOCUS: That trip to Berlin was, of course, by no means your first experience with the Berlin Wall or divided Germany. What had been your prior relationship with the two German states? RES: First of all, I have to say I come from a German-American family. I remember as a child my father preparing care packages in the immediate post- war era. I remember my uncle, who had served in the German army coming and settling near us in New Hampshire. I was conscious of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, as a kid – I was only 12 years old then. My first actual experience with the Wall came in my senior year in high school, when I took an AP history course from a very distinguished history teacher. So I had already been sensitized to events in Germany. Then when I went to college, I majored in German and Philosophy of Religion, and I went on a junior year abroad program to Marburg. At the time, the akademisches Auslandsamt of Marburg was funding trips to Berlin for, I think, fifty marks for ten days. On that occasion we went to Berlin. Of course we stayed in West Berlin and took a bus tour into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, and I remember that vividly. We went to the Soviet war memorial in Treptow. That was kind of the agenda that the guide had, the East German friendship with the Soviets and their role as one of the Allies in control of Berlin in ‘64, the Cold War Era. One anecdote at that time: I had a friend who had escaped from East Germany, and we went to visit his grandmother in deep East Berlin. I walked the streets alone while he was with his grandmother, and I heard music coming from some windows, and I knocked on the door, and sure enough it was a bunch of people my age. So I engaged them, and one of them invited me to a Gasthaus and started to talk to me, to make friends with me. He revealed that he was going to go into the Volkspolizei in the near future, and that he was thinking of escaping as a Volkspolizist across the East-West divide. And he asked me whether I could bring a long-playing record of Beatles music over the next day. I said of course I can do that, and I left. And as I was going back through Checkpoint Charlie, I thought, “I’m never going back there,” because I was being set up to become a Fluchthelfer and then possibly be turned in the sense of intelligence: “Will you work for us to ensure your freedom” and so forth; that was my suspicion. And so this Cold War manipulation – I don’t know what you want to call it – of young American college students speaking fluent German – I felt it right away. I was sensitive to it. That of course was the period of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. After that, I returned to the United States but went back to Marburg for my MA degree. On that occasion, I again went to Berlin, went into East Berlin, crossed the Wall through Checkpoint Charlie. That crossing was always an anxiety-filled event. You walked by the guard house of the US Army and passed down the street, and there was a marker on the street – a white stripe, the border of East Berlin. And while you were doing this, it was relatively open space, and there was a guard tower and a little window, and you were being observed. Perhaps one was imagining too much; nonetheless, you felt on edge, and then you   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 124       went through a narrow entrance through the Wall and went into a little hut, where you surrendered your passport, which was, again, I think, a form of intimidation in the sense that you surrendered your passport, and you had to wait for an hour, or in some cases two hours to get it returned, and you didn’t know if it would ever be returned, and you were in East Berlin at that time without a passport. I don’t think they would have started an international incident, but they wanted to serve notice that they were in control. But then you walked up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden, and it was really an enjoyable thing. I spent quite a bit of money buying reasonably priced items, books and so forth you could get for next to nothing, and you could take those things back. That was ’67–’68, in that time frame. Later I went into military counterintelligence, and I was stationed in Frankfurt with the 165th Military Intelligence Company and was assigned to Kassel as a field office commander with an area of responsibility between Fulda and Hannoversch Münden, which was right on the border to the British sector, a considerable stretch of the Demarkationslinie. The highlight of my experience was – this was the time in 1970 when Chancellor Willy Brandt was opening towards the East, trying to gain a rapprochement with the DDR, with Poland and so forth. The first meeting was in Erfurt, with the president of the DDR; the second meeting was in Kassel. This was a very controversial meeting, because somebody managed to get into the safe zone and rip down the DDR flag, so it caused a hubbub and virtually an international incident, and I was on the inside of all of this on the security detail. So that was, for me, really fascinating, rubbing shoulders – not with Willy Brandt, but almost. FOCUS: As a professor, you also had an “academic” relationship with the two Germanys. What form did that take? RES: I established a relationship to the Lessing Museum in Kamenz which is near Dresden, and they invited me in 1979 as a guest of the DDR to give a talk at the University of Halle-Wittenberg at a conference, ‘79 being the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Lessing’s birth. I remember to this day giving the talk: On one side was an outsized portrait of Lessing and on the other side an outsized portrait of Honecker, the East German dictator. You can just imagine the triangulation of ideologies that are playing themselves out there, and you as an American Germanist – the only one there – were recognized as okay because you had been on the correct side during the Second World War. My relationship to Kamenz was really rather close, and I considered it a part of what I called cultural diplomacy, working with them to open this provincial museum up to the big world, as it were. Coming in myself several times – in a Luther-Jahr I was there also. They invited me quite often, because it served their ends in saying, “Yes, we are recognized by the American Lessing Society, and we are here in the provincial DDR, but we are recognized by the United States.” It was a political game, and just going to Kamenz in 1979 and then again in ‘83 was always an adventure, but I found out that I had a special status, because I had been invited, and to be invited meant that you were “Gast der DDR”. And that phrase, which had introduced my invitation, was a buzzword; it was code. That is, whenever I went in, my Gastgeber at the museum had to clear me through the Kulturministerium of the DDR. In subsequent years, of course, I went repeatedly   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 125       with student groups from the Hamburg program of the University of Cincinnati, and we always went to Berlin, and I always ushered students through the Berlin Wall, almost always without incident, but I will say, that was an experience, because when you go in with a student group, you tell them you have to be back in the West before midnight. And of course some of them came out at 9:00, and I’m sitting there checking off the names, and sometimes they came out at 11:59. They’d come walking through Checkpoint Charlie into the West. They did not realize how serious an issue the Wall was. They saw it as kind of a game. I had the responsibility: What am I going to tell their parents if they’re detained? So this cat and mouse game played itself out. And what is interesting about that is that I had been an American Military Intelligence Operative on the East-West German border, and I was always concerned that when I went into Ost-Berlin they would pick me up, so there was that anxiety. They never did, and I’m not sure why not, because I know they had me in their files, because I know they had photographed me on the East-West German Border and so forth, and these low-level [East German] agents who would come through my office in Kassel, of course were gathering information on me. FOCUS: Given your copious first-hand experience with divided Germany, what effect did the Wende have on you? What do you think its influence has been on Germany over the last quarter century? RES: The one thing I think – all of my experiences in the Cold War, which I’ve just related to you and plus the Fall of the Wall, it’s hard to describe, but it was an Einschnitt in a certain sense in my whole consciousness of what it is to be a German professor, what it is to be a German-American, and in point of fact, I would go so far as to say this: I became much more kulturpatriotisch vis-à-vis Germany as a result of my experiences, because I am to this day incredibly impressed by the East German citizenry in Leipzig and in all of the other cities and then finally in Berlin, amazed by their non-violent revolution against a totalitarian regime. They were hypothetically disenfranchised, but they weren’t really, they were just suppressed, and then they put it on the line in a mode that they had experienced, in a certain sense, by having observed the American Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King. And in point of fact they sang “We Shall Overcome” on the streets of Leipzig and Dresden and any number of towns throughout Germany. Berlin was one of the last ones where those major demonstrations took place just before the Fall of the Wall, because, of course, the powers that be were in Berlin. Photograph by Richard Schade, 1989 I always tell my students now: The current German nation, united in 1990, is the oldest, longest- living German Democracy in German history. 1918- 1933, that was the Weimar Republic, but that wasn’t as long as what we are now dealing with. As I look back on it, it was kind of a sense to me that the Fall of the Wall and what you call the Wende – I gained real   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 126       respect for the intellect and the drive of the citizenry of East Germany. Now the problems, the disjunction, the so-called Mauer im Kopf and all that, if it even exists, it exists in the older generation. The children of the older generation don’t have a Mauer im Kopf, generally speaking. And certainly their children, the third generation, as it were, it’s going to be passé. So I think the shift has been profound, and I know it’s caused a shift in me. I will say that my work as honorary consul from 1996 to 2012, which also involved cultural diplomacy, as well as administrative affairs representing Germany, I felt proud that I could make the argument I just made. Germany is no longer the Germany of the Holocaust. Germany places the Holocaust memorial right in the heart of Berlin next to the Brandenburg Gate. It triangulates the Brandenburg Gate and all that represents, the Reichstag and all that represents. It triangulates, it relates to Friedrichstraße, which was always the axis of government in the Second Reich as well as in the Nazi era. To put that monument right there is an act of intellectual honesty and political maturity. That’s the way I see it. Excuse me if I’m getting passionate. FOCUS: Some of what you said is, I think, borne out by a recent article on the website of Der Spiegel3, which reported on a survey of young Germans, which found that a large majority of them see the differences between Northern and Southern Germany as more prevalent and relevant to them today than the East-West split. Does that surprise you? RES: I think that’s very, very interesting because of course that North-South divide is older than the East- West divide. It’s the Catholic South versus the Protestant North, you know, all of the history of that, the linguistic distinctions and so forth. What I think is very important and is, quite frankly, lacking in research on unification is there’s a Berlin-centrism to studies on German unification, and that has to be corrected. Because how was the Wende experienced in Bayern? How was it experienced in Hessen, which was a border territory on the East-West German border? How was it experienced in the Saarland, which is more French than it is German in a certain sense? To that end I have suggested that we have a conference next year which will focus on German unification, but with a focus on the regional response. And then how has Germany profiled itself since the Wende vis-à-vis Europe? That’s the really important issue. Germany has always been “mitten in Europa.” Günter Grass famously said we should not allow Germany to unite after 1990 in that time frame, because a united Germany is a dangerous Germany. Well, Grass had it just plain wrong, because you see this united Germany which is economically, politically a force, I would argue, for the positive, certainly in the European community, if not for the world. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was born and educated in East Berlin, is, they say, the most powerful woman in the world, and I tend to agree with that. She’s the Margaret Thatcher of this era. There’s no question about that – an “Iron Lady.” FOCUS: But unification was never an entirely uncontroversial issue. You’ve already mentioned Grass, but can you talk some more about the controversy surrounding unification? Do you see any of the concerns raised at that time as having been justified in light of the past twenty five years? RES: Chancellor Helmut Kohl had a sense of history, I think. For whatever else you may think of Helmut Kohl, he had a sense of history, and it was very   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 127       controversial how in 1990 he went on campaign with his Zehn Punkte and forced West Germany down the throats of the East Germans by promising “blühende Landschaften,” which didn’t blossom as he promised they would, because there’s still a socio-economic divide in Germany. I think what’s profoundly important is that Grass and the people who were the nay-sayers or the contrarians felt that nationalism would rear its ugly head, and it hasn’t. Patriotism has, as you see in the World Cup, but nationalism hasn’t, with the exception of certain fringes, who now and again rear their head in state parliaments and are so ineffective they’re voted out the next time through. Whatever you may think of politics, the politicians, CDU, SPD all of the chancellors who have come since unification, Germany has had a conscious strategy to embed themselves in a unified Europe to overcome the fact that they had sinned in Hitlerian Germany, and this is expunging Germany, I think, consciously. By embedding themselves in the European idea, they’re overcoming all of that. By embedding it in that, rather than in the age-old French-German rivalry, the age-old German-Slavic tension, which placed them “mitten in Europa.” It’s still there but it’s meaningless in terms of political action now. I think what’s been instrumentalized in Germany, really, is the sound, democratic, ideals that manifested themselves in the street demonstrations. I think those have been instrumentalized for the greater good, and transcending narrow Germanness into a Europeanness, they feel they have a responsibility to Europe. Which, if you think about it, really, the European community is what Hitler would have loved to have under his control. Now, this is a European Community which is distinct in every state. As problematic as unified Europe may be, the bad old days can never come again – we hope, no – I know! FOCUS: Your academic career has been marked by the study of images and visual culture. How do you understand the role that those aspects have played in the Wende, both at the time and in the years since? RES: I think from a standpoint of the arts – and I don’t know film, so I can’t speak to film, and modern literature, post-’90 literature, I’m well informed about that. But what I think is: Architecturally, the way Berlin has developed, especially the Federal Quarter, argues for that to be a contradiction of the Prussian model and the model of Great Berlin that Hitler had in his mind. The Bernauerstraße Memorial to the Wall, the cobblestone memorial to the Wall, the fact that the trace of the Wall is still visible as a bicycle path in major parts of Berlin, if you see those as artistic statements, there’s profound memory culture at play there where you’re supposed to recreate as well as Photograph by Richard Schade, 1989   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 128       remember. I think there’s sort of an aesthetic experience in how they’re commemorating the Wall. How is the Wall being commemorated? How are the anniversaries being commemorated in Berlin? The medium is the message. And then, of course, there are still remnants of the Wall kept intact and watchtowers and so forth, like artifacts of works of totalitarian art. That is part of memory culture. I’m not sure what they’re trying to do; they just don’t want people to forget. And if you walk over those cobblestones on your way somewhere, it’s like the Stolpersteine, remembering the Jews who were deported from this house, and that the Wall has receded into an internal space, if you want to think of it that way. I can’t put my finger on it, but you’re asking me questions I have to think about, which is good. FOCUS: There seems to be a somewhat inconsistent attitude toward East German architecture, though. The Wall, of course, was almost completely dismantled, save for the “artifacts,” as you mentioned, and, even speaking proportionally, there is still less left of the Palast der Republik. On the other hand, the Fernsehturm still dominates the city’s skyline as one of the most recognizable landmarks in the city. Do you see any rhyme or reason to the relationship between united Berlin, or even united Germany, and its East-German architectural past? RES: I would say that the three monuments in Berlin that I consider to be East German architecture par excellence are, number one, what was once called the Stalinallee, those buildings from the 1950s that brought East Germany to the brink of revolution in 1953, the other one being the Wall, and the Fernsehturm. I would go so far to say that the Mauer was the most German. It’s the most explicit expression of German totalitarianism. I have read the field manuals of the VoPos telling them exactly how to run the show. I think that is the most German. Why is the Wall the most German? I mean German in a stereotypical way: militaristic, cold and calculating, totally through-composed. Because the Wall is only one manifestation of the barrier, because you have the towers, you have the Hundeleinen, you have the tank traps, the barriers, searchlights and so forth, I mean, total ausgeklügelt! That’s the most stereotypical notion of what it is to be German, sad to say, in a traditional sense. That statement is gewagt, but I’ll put it out there. It’s a stereotype, which I think has indeed been transcended by, for instance, the Brücke in the Federal Quarter that crosses from East to West across the Spree. But in the sense of being totally ausgeklügelt and brutally rational, und und und – I remember the Wall with the barbed wire on top, when it was just slabs of concrete blocks, think of the building process, it was refined and refined and refined. There’s a perfectionism at play. When I was on the East-West German border, they had markers to mark the border. Well, we observed East German engineers replacing those with a similar marker, but it had a little metal Stift on the top. Was this an Abhörgerät, or what was it? We just couldn’t figure out what it was, until one of the Bundesgrenzschutz sergeants said, “You know why that’s there? So birds don’t land and shit on it.” And that’s exactly why it was there. That’s what I mean by perfectionism. The Wall, no question, was an engineering marvel. I’m curious what you’re going to do with that. I really want you to put that in there, because that’s brisant. FOCUS: I think that’s an appropriately provocative note to   Focus on German Studies 21           Richard E. Schade 129       end on, but I do have one more question for you: Though you’ve continued to teach both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses, you are transitioning into retirement and the role of professor emeritus. We’ve been talking for almost two hours and seem to have only barely scratched the surface of your experiences. Have you considered publishing your memoirs to preserve these first-hand encounters with the Wall and this period of German history? RES: I’m an old guy, and every old guy who’s intellectually aware of things can tell these kinds of stories. In a certain sense I would love to do it, but I find that I can tell it, but I can’t write it. The Freedom Center asked me to do a statement for their docents on the Wall segment, so I imagined myself being a docent who doesn’t have an intimate knowledge but has a text and talking to a crowd of visitors about the Wall, and I pounded something out. It came across as being very conversational, because I made it that way. I sent it to my daughters for them to critique it – and they are the best critics – and they said, “God, dad, I didn’t know you could write in that style.” So I think that I could write a kind of anecdotal biographical statement of some length, because we’ve been talking for, whatever, an hour or so [nearly two hours] and I’ve skipped over a lot of details that I would put into that. Die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden, I feel, is the most effective way, and I just don’t know whether I could put it down on paper. Come to think of it, this interview, once published, is a sort of biography. And I will say this, kind of as a coda, I consider the Wall segment in Cincinnati to be a part of my legacy, and I’m not going to call it a gravestone, but it’s a monument – this is the way I see it – it’s a monument to an idea I had to take that segment of wall, bring it to Cincinnati and have it interpreted in a context that defies totalitarianism and champions freedom at the Freedom Center. FOCUS: Alright, thank you so much for your time. This has been very informative and a real pleasure. RES: Oh, no, this is interesting. I enjoy talking, as you know. Vielen Dank – Berlin bleibt Berlin! Matthew Bauman conducted this interview on October 15, 2014. 1 For further information on this and other Berlin Wall exhibits in the U.S., see Dr. Schade’s 2004 paper “Berlin Wall Installations in the United States: Documentation with Commentary,” accessible 2 The exhibition, titled Along the Wall: Photographs at the Fall of Berlin Wall, 1989, ran from November third to twenty-sixth, 2014 in Gallery K in the Max Kade German Cultural Center. 3 Padtberg-Kruse, Carola. “Jugend-Umfrage zur Einheit: Ost und West? Egal! Auf Nord und Süd kommt es an.” Spiegel Online. Spiegel Online GmbH, 3 Oct. 2014. Web. 14 Oct. 2014.