- Hi, this is Jim Willis
and over the next couple
of weeks I'm going to be
traveling back to Berlin,
a city I've been to many times,
to cover the 20th anniversary
of the fall of the Berlin Wall
which for three decades
stood as a visible reminder
of the split between
the communist world and
the world of democracy
and Western capitalism.
I look forward to the trip,
the anniversary itself takes
place on November the 9th.
I'll be filing stories
before then and after then
and it's going to be
an interesting journey.
I've made a number of friends in Berlin
over the last several years.
I'll be contacting some
of them, talking to some
Americans about their
experiences when they were there
during this period of the
late '80s and the early '90s
when Eastern communism came to an end,
and I look forward to
sharing that over the course
of the next two weeks
with you and I invite you
to join me on that journey.
I was a working journalist
for about a dozen years
before I entered university teaching.
I am a graduate of the
University of Oklahoma
where I got my degree in
journalism and I went along
to pick up a Master's at
Texas A&M and a doctorate
at the University of Missouri,
but in between those
degrees I worked for several
newspapers, including the
Oklahoman, who I will be
filing these stories for, newsok.com,
and for the Dallas Morning News.
I wound up making the
transition to academia
following more than a
decade in the news business,
and it's been interesting
to sort of reflect
in the classroom on my
experiences as a journalist
and then I've also had
opportunities come along
through the years, to
go back to work as a journalist.
I was working at Boston
College, teaching there and
chairing the department in the
mid 1990s, early-mid 1990s,
and I was home visiting my
parents in Oklahoma City
when the bombing occurred at
the Murrah federal building
there in Oklahoma City.
I stayed on for about
three months and covered
the aftermath of that
for a newspaper there,
in the Oklahoma City area.
I was back home four years
later when the F-5 twister
blew through the state and
I got caught in its path
and I wound up reporting on
that for the Oklahoman as well,
and then ten years ago
I went back to Berlin
to cover the tenth anniversary
of the fall of the wall
for the Oklahoman, so I
enjoy having this kind of
professional and academic
background and I think
one benefits the other
as I go about trying to
talk to students about
issues in the media,
and best ways of covering stories.
People of my generation,
I'm a baby boomer,
lived through the worldwide
threat of communism,
especially following World
War II, and on into the '60s
and the '70s and even the '80s,
so for us,
communism was the big threat in the world,
for those of us in the
West, as terrorism is today.
And the most visible sign
that all was not well
in the world was the
construction of the Berlin Wall
in 1961, which divided not only
East Berlin from West Berlin
but really all of Eastern
Europe, communist Europe, from
democratic, free Europe.
The wall as I said went up
in 1961 following a period
of about 12 years where
East Germans were trying
to restrict the flow,
the defection of their countrymen
to the West and to freedom
and they weren't having
any luck doing that so they
realized they were gonna
have to put up some sort
of a physical barrier, arm it with guards,
and dogs, and mines,
and shut down the defections that way,
it was very effective of course.
And so from 1961 to 1989
this wall virtually divided
and virtually encircled West
Berlin, because it followed
the path of the border that was given to
Russia after World War
II as the spoils of war
when Germany was divided up
among the conquering powers.
So it has had a menacing
historical effect on the world
and when it came down the
night of November 9th in 1989,
not only Germany but all
of the world breathed a,
all of the free world breathed
a collective sigh of relief
as they realized communism
in Eastern Europe
was actually crumbling.
Students of today find it
hard to relate to all of that
because many of our college
students were either not born
in 1989 or they were being
born or were toddlers
and so the idea of a communist threat
has never really haunted them.
Indeed, the threat of
international terrorism
is the menace today, but for so many years
it was Eastern communism,
and the fall of the wall
signaled the end to that threat.
Over the years I've done a
lot of work with Germans,
we've engaged in various
projects, both academics
and myself and also journalists,
it'll be good to get
back in touch with them,
I'm actually going to be
filing some of my pieces,
some of my stories from
the Berlin headquarters
of German television ZDF,
which is their large news network,
television news network over there.
Certainly the events of
that evening are going to
commemorate the lives of
hundreds who were killed
as they tried to flee from
East Germany to the safety
of the West and were
willing to risk their lives
and in fact many did,
in fact lose their lives
in that process.
In 1999 when the hour
was approaching
that the wall actually
was breached in 1989,
the city of Berlin lit up
flares all along the paths
that the wall took throughout
and around the city of Berlin.
Today there are only a few chunks
of that wall that are left intact.
The longest stretch runs
for about 1.3 kilometers
and is now called the
East Side Gallery because
that wall now is adorned
now with the artwork of 91
important artists, both East
German and West Germans.
So there are going to be a
lot of activities that will
be focusing on this and
of course the main event
is going to be commemorating
the actual opening
of the wall that evening
which actually became
a reality as a form of an accident,
the border guards got
confused, they didn't have
any particular orders to
keep people out that night
and once people started coming across
there was no closing
the gate, so it would be
interesting to go back and
to celebrate all of that.
So I look forward to having you join me,
I think APU is going to
be featuring some of the
pieces that I send back
and I'll also be sharing them with the
student newspaper there at APU, the Cause,
and also KAPU radio, and
I look forward to as many
of you as would like to join
me in spirit on this journey,
I'll be sending back photos
and videos, et cetera,
and some of those will be uploaded,
and it should be interesting,
enjoyable, and
very definitely a worthy commemoration
of a world-changing event.
