As the world marks 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Atlanta International School has erected a segment on its own campus.
The graffiti-graced concrete slab stands about 10 feet tall and 3 feet wide. It arrived last week, just in time for the school’s Nov. 20 dedication ceremony.
It’s unclear where exactly where this particular segment originally stood. AIS communications director Courtney Fowler said it’s likely that it was part of the section that divided the American section of the West Berlin from East Germany near a town called Kleinmachnow.
“Die Berliner Mauer (the Berlin Wall) is a powerful symbol of the importance of the mission of our school and a reminder of what happens when international mindedness, dialogue, communication and collaboration fail,” Atlanta International School Headmaster Kevin Glass said in a statement.
The piece will take on some added poignancy in its new location considering the school’s substantial German community and the fact that AIS teaches German language to children as young as 3 at its early childhood center. Students follow a German-language track all the way through the fifth grade, with a dual-immersion program available that allows them to spend 50 percent of class time in the target language.
The school recently recruited a new head of primary school, Camille Du Aime, from the Berlin Brandenburg International School, which is located near the town where the piece of the wall is thought to have stood. She will make remarks at the dedication event, where German Consul General Christoph Sander is also slated to speak.
The school isn’t the first metro-area patron to get such a hulking hunk of history. Last year, a Serbian-American restaurateur in Suwanee paid $23,500 to acquire a piece of the wall that was auctioned off in metro Atlanta to repay investors bilked out of millions of dollars by a local wealth manager.
To attend the AIS ceremony, RSVP to Meg Watts at mwatts@aischool.org.
