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Whenever she ends an interview with a German official or historian Hope M. Harrison, associate professor of history and international affairs, gets a similar comment. "They always say, 'It's so good that you are doing this,' " she said, explaining that the officials and experts are referring to the fact that she is not German. Usually, the follow-up question is, "When will your book be out?"

"Looking back at the history of the Berlin Wall and the division of Germany has become so politicized," Harrison explained, "that many Germans feel that the only way to get an objective analysis of the ways Germany has been approaching the history of the Berlin Wall and the division of Germany over the past 20 years is for a non-German to do it."

Harrison's upcoming book, tentatively titled The Demise and Resurrection of the Berlin Wall: German Debates about the Berlin Wall as a Site of Memory, 1989-2009, is much anticipated in Germany. Harrison recently won a Fulbright award, which will help her continue her research for the book in Berlin in the 2009-2010 academic year. Her first book, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961 (Princeton, 2003), won the 2004 Marshall Shulman book prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for the "best book on the international relations of countries of the former Soviet bloc."

Harrison, who directs the Elliott School's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and its master's program in European and Eurasian Studies, first learned about winning the Fulbright in an email she received late one evening after coming home from a symposium she was running on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Harrison runs the GW Cold War Group, which works with the National Security Archive and Cold War International History Project to explore the Cold War experience and its implications for understanding current policy issues.

On previous trips to Berlin, Harrison has already conducted 50 interviews with members of the Bundestag, the Berlin Senate, German officials, historians, preservationists, and heads of museums and memorials on a variety of topics related to the history of the Wall.

"I have many more interviews and much more research to do to understand the views of various Germans on the history of the Berlin Wall and how that history should be portrayed now in Berlin," she said. Now with the Fulbright grant, she will have the opportunity to meet those goals. "I will also go outside of Berlin to see how other localities portray the division of Germany and its history, especially museums and memorials along the former East-West German border," she said.

In February, Harrison accompanied members of Congress and the German Bundestag to Russia for top-level meetings as part of a project sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. In May, she will be part of another delegation sponsored by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the think tank of the German Social Democratic Party. During the trip, Russian, German, and American experts will discuss current critical issues, including the financial crisis, NATO-Russia relations, and dealing with Iran, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

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