It is now twenty-five years since the Berlin Wall came down. In autumn 1989, a massive concrete structure that had separated friends, family and neighbours for over 29 years finally became permeable and collapsed under the pressure of civic protest, ultimately giving way to a reunited Germany. It is an irony of history that the construction of this deadly barrier began with a press conference in 1961 and that its final collapse was again initiated by a press conference in 1989.
Jan Niklas Kocks is a research associate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests include political public relations, public relations history and the application of social network analysis in contexts of political communication.
Juliana Raupp is a professor of organisational communication at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include strategic political communication, risk and crisis communication, social network analysis and evaluation research.