Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Julia Sonnevend (The New School) will present this lecture as part of the CES speaker series The Collapse: 1989 Then and Now with support from the Department of Education Title VI National Resource grant.

This talk contemplates how particular events become lasting global myths, while others fade into oblivion. What comes to be known and seen as a global iconic event? Focusing on news coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and on contemporary retellings of the event, Sonnevend discusses how storytellers build up certain events so that people remember them for a long time. The East German border opening that we know as the “fall of the Berlin Wall” was in fact unintentional, confusing, and prompted in part by misleading media coverage of bureaucratic missteps. But its international message is not about luck or accident or happenstance in history. Incarnated as a global iconic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall has come to communicate the momentary power that ordinary people can have. The event’s story, branded as a simple phrase, a short narrative and a recognizable visual scene, provides people from China to Turkey to the United States with a powerful social myth. This myth shapes our debates about separation walls and fences, borders and refugees, and the possibilities of human freedom to this day.