ABSTRACT
I n 2009 people all across the globe celebrated the twentieth anniversaryof the events of 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, paving the way to the reunificationof Germany and the end of the Cold War. For those of us who now teach, one no-table aspect of this anniversary was the shock of realizing that events that were so pivotal to our own intellectual and academic path happened before most of our students now were born! One of this chapter’s authors entered college in the fall of 1989 and remembers watching the news about the Berlin Wall in her Russian history class, which paused to track these monumental current events. As a historian of Central Europe and a former resident of Berlin, she often finds it natural to use the shorthand “fall of the Berlin Wall” as a way of talking about post-1989 transitions. Berlin is truly central to international understanding of Cold War history, as well as to the commemorations and histories of the transition taking place throughout Europe with the collapse of communism.
