Westminster College Students Recreate, Then Tear Down, the Berlin Wall

Construction on the replica wall began in August. About fifteen students worked on it, mostly drawn from the college's history and Classics clubs and, in a gesture of bipartisanship, both the Young Democrats and the Young Republicans. "It was a fun experience," says Philip Mohr, a senior from Maryland Heights who was one of the project's organizers. "It was especially fun for the students who had no experience in carpentry. Mistakes were made."

Unlike the original wall, which was concrete and steel, the replica was made from lumber and drywall. Each section is eight feet tall and four feet long. "It's the same thickness as a wall in your house," says Mohr. "It's close to the dimensions of the real Berlin Wall. The real wall was actually two walls with space in between to keep people from jumping over."

The real wall was also topped by barbed wire, but the replica will only have cardboard tubes.

Last week, the eight sections of the replica wall were displayed on the Westminster campus and in the town of Fulton and neighboring William Woods University and taken to local schools. Students and townspeople were invited to paint their own graffiti in imitation of the painting on the original wall.

"The schoolchildren mostly wrote their names," says Mohr. "They had limited time and they needed to give everyone a chance. At William Woods, the wall was painted by art classes and the graffiti focused around freedom and democracy. At Westminster there was quite a bit about freedom, and peace and love and a lot of peace signs. I'm not sure if anybody recreated anything from the original wall, but someone spraypainted 'Stasi' and crossed it out."