Books

We Are All Berliners

The experiences of the Northern Irish during the IRA struggles and the Eastern Germans during the cold war.

By Claudia Clark

Ever since I first visited Berlin the summer between my junior and senior years of high school in 1990, I fell in love it. The Berlin Wall had been down almost a year that point, but there were remains and evidence of the wall that had divided the city not too long ago. I had always been fascinated with Berlin and the Wall and thought numerous times about writing about it, but I was always stuck on what angle to take. Then, last spring while on vacation in Belfast in Northern Ireland, I became obsessed with the Peace Walls that had been built to divide the Catholic and Protestant populations during the IRA troubles in the 1970s.

Fully realizing embarking on this type of project of comparing the lives and experiences of two cities divided by walls would be a tremendous undertaking, I decided to begin the research project to see if the task were worth undertaking. Over the past several months, I began the long process of collecting, sorting, and reading articles and book on the topic.