Exhibit marks 25 years since Berlin Wall’s destruction

IOWA CITY - November 9 will mark 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that means most current students at the University of Iowa weren't born until after that seminal moment in history.

That's part of what inspired Shalla Ashworth, associate director of the UI's Old Capitol Museum, to create an exhibit looking back at the history of East Germany.

'The students that are here ... it's not part of their generation,” she said. 'We want to expose them to what a communist existence was like.”

The exhibit, 'A Tear in the Iron Curtain: 25 Years Since the Fall of the Wall,” is on display now through Dec. 31 in the museum's Hanson Humanities Gallery.

It includes photographs and personal items from Iowans with East Berlin connections, including military gear and even East German toilet paper made from recycled newsprint.

'They had to use their resources so carefully they had quite amazing recycling systems in place before Americans were even thinking about it,” said Cindy Opitz, collections manager for the UI's Museum of Natural History.

She spent two years studying in East Berlin in the late 1980s, where she fell in love with an East German man she ended up marrying.

She and her husband, Torsten Opitz, will join a panel of speakers for a Nov. 6 event related to the exhibit.

The event, 'The Fall in the Wall: A Celebration of Freedom,” will feature stories from six people with personal connections to East Germany.

Visitors also will have a chance to interact with the exhibit. Starting at the Nov. 6 event, people will be able to add their own graffiti to a wall replica, to emulate the graffiti that covered the Berlin Wall before it fell.

'The graffiti was only on the western part of the wall,” Ashworth said. 'It was about expressing freedom, creativity.”

Cindy Opitz said she hopes people appreciate that for all the ways Western and Eastern life were different during the Cold Wars, in many ways life was the same. As a student in East Germany, she went to class and parties and went out with friends the same way she did in the United States.

'It's difficult now to even fathom how divided the world was into us versus them, east versus west,” Cindy Opitz said. 'It was a very strange time, looking back at how pervasive that division was.”

IF YOU GO

What: The Fall of the Wall: A Celebration of Freedom

When: 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday (Nov. 6)

Where: Old Capitol Museum, 21 Old Capitol, the University of Iowa

Cost: Free