This talk contemplates how particular events become lasting global myths, while others fade into oblivion. What comes to be known and seen as a global iconic event? Focusing on news coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and on contemporary retellings of the event, Sonnevend discusses how storytellers build up certain events so that people remember them for a long time. The East German border opening that we know as the “fall of the Berlin Wall” was in fact unintentional, confusing, and prompted in part by misleading media coverage of bureaucratic missteps. But its global message is not about luck or accident or happenstance in history. Incarnated as a global iconic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall has come to communicate the momentary power that ordinary people can have. The event’s story, branded as a simple phrase, a short narrative and a recognizable visual scene, provides people from China to Israel to the United States with a powerful social myth. This myth shapes our debates about separation walls and fences, borders and refugees, and the possibilities of human freedom to this day.

Julia Sonnevend is assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan. She has held fellowships at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in New Haven. Her interdisciplinary research examines the role of media events, rituals, performances and icons in global culture. Sonnevend is author of Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (MIT Press, 2016). She received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University and her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School.