7:00 pm
Joukowsky Forum at the Watson Institute, free and open to the public with reception following
“West Meets East – Past Experiences and Current Challenges,” with Consul General Reiner Möckelmann, Retired West German Diplomat and Director of Summer School Wust .
Consul General Reiner Möckelmann, a former West German diplomat, who held posts at the embassies in Moscow, Belgrad, Vienna, Lima, Ankara and as Consul General in Istanbul, will lecture about his experiences working for the embassy during the Cold War and now since 2006 as Director of the Summer School Wust located in former East Germany. This school was founded in order to give educational opportunities to former citizens of the GDR. Consul Möckelmann’s career was influenced greatly by the existence of the Berlin Wall. Due to security reasons, as a western diplomat he did not enter East Germany except in transit to Moscow. Upon his retirement, he assumed the Directorship of the Wust Summer School and celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall at the school this summer by hosting prominent figures from politics and law who were participants in the ‘peaceful revolution’ and members of formal roundtable negotiations in eastern Germany in 1989-1990. Brown University’s German Studies Professor Kay Goodman was a founder of this summer school. Each summer, two to three Brown students travel to Wust to work as instructors at the summer school and to live with families in the village.
Sponsored by the C. V. Starr Lectureship Fund.