1963–
A Cold War historian who recast the Berlin Wall's origins
Of East Germany pushing the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall, she compressed the dynamic into one line: "the tail wagged the dog."
Hope M. Harrison is an American historian of Germany, Russia, and Cold War international politics. Her major study, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall, reconstructs Soviet-East German relations through East German and Soviet archival sources. Challenging accounts that treated the 1961 border closure as Nikita Khrushchev's decision alone, she argues that Walter Ulbricht repeatedly pressured Moscow as the GDR faced political and economic crisis. Her interpretation highlights how a smaller socialist state and tensions within an alliance could shape Cold War high politics.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1985B.A., Columbia University
- 1993Ph.D., Columbia University
- 1999–현재Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University
- 2003Published Driving the Soviets Up the Wall
- 2004Received the Marshall Shulman Book Prize
- 2019Published After the Berlin Wall
Related historical events
From the Wall's Origins to Memory Politics: The Second Research Turn
Harrison's second book turns from the decision to build the Wall to the question of how German society has remembered and commemorated it since 1989. In spring 2004 she was at the American Academy in Berlin as a fellow, researching a project titled "Making History: United Germany's Attempts to Come to Terms with East Germany's Past." In 2009-2010 she was in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship at the Federal Foundation for Reappraising the SED Dictatorship, working on a second book about German approaches to commemorating the Berlin Wall since 1989. That research appeared in 2019 as After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present (Cambridge University Press). Drawing on an extensive range of archival sources and interviews, she profiles the memory activists who fought to commemorate the Wall's history and examines their role in creating a new German national narrative. On her account, the Wall, with its victims, perpetrators and heroes, joined the Holocaust as a core element of German collective memory, and the major Wall anniversaries became signposts marking how Germans viewed the past and connected it to the present. The book considers multiple ways of remembering the Wall through memorials, trials, public ceremonies, films and music, and traces how global memory of the Wall has shaped German memory policy. It depicts both the power and the fragility of state-backed memory projects, and their potential to reconcile or divide. The turn carried into institutional work: she served on the boards of the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Allied Museum in Berlin, the Cold War Center in Berlin and the Point Alpha Foundation, chaired the Advisory Council of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, and was a Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center in fall 2011.