HELENA — Helena’s two public high schools are setting aside their rivalry and becoming allies to celebrate East and West Germany becoming one on the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Fifteen students from the Helena and Capital High Schools joint German club worked for 16 hours on the plywood wall. The project is a partnership with Helena Public Schools and Holter Museum of Art and it is sponsored by Dick Anderson Construction.
“It’s supposed to symbolize Helena united. We painted a very recognizable piece of Helena and included a lot of different callbacks to different places, like the Eddy’s bakery sign and stickers from different local businesses,” said Willow Murphy, a junior at Capital High School.
When he was around the same age as the German club students, Montana native James Westerberg spent time in both East and West Berlin just five years before the wall was torn down.
He said, “There’s probably not a lot of people that did it as a tourist, which is what I was.”
Hesterberg spent one month in Germany on a school trip, with five days spent in Berlin, one on the east side.
“Going through security, it was a significant event and we were nervous. We had to exchange some money, and then we weren’t allowed to bring any of their currency back with us. Things were kind of grey and drab on the east side, and the west side was a modern city,” he said.
Why, after 35 years, is the fall of the Berlin Wall something to commemorate?
Hesterberg said, “It’s good to see that things could return to how they had once been for that country.”
“We need to remember what happened so it doesn’t repeat, and doing it all across the world helps us make sure we don’t repeat history,” said Murphy.
