DeKALB — Katharina Barbe enjoys teaching her students about her days living in West Berlin, when the Berlin Wall surrounded the western part of the major city.

Barbe, an associate professor of German and the chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Northern Illinois University, spoke Thursday during NIU's commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was Nov. 9, 1989.

Barbe recently spoke with reporter Andrea Azzo about her time living in West Berlin. Although West Berlin was influenced by Western powers, such as Great Britain and the United States, it was surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany.

Azzo: Where were you when the wall was built?

Barbe: I was born in Berlin before they built the wall. Then when the Cold War was going on, the wall was built in 1961. I was still a small child. We always lived in West Berlin. When the wall came up in August 1961, we were on vacation in Denmark. When we came back, I don't remember [what happened] because I was so small. My parents told me it was one big mess, but we lived in the west.

Azzo: What was it like when they first put the wall up?

Barbe: I don't know, we never really talked about it. For a long time, when the wall came up, everybody was kind of shell-shocked. If you think about it, it's like Sycamore and DeKalb, you can't get to Sycamore anymore.

Growing up in West Berlin was kind of cool. You could still transit out of Berlin, but you had to cross the border and stay on certain roads. You could take the train, but they always checked your passports.

Parents would say to us, "Don’t say anything." My dad was a musician. When we crossed the border to visit relatives in West Germany, they tore your car apart and looked everywhere. Dogs sniffed everything. My dad was a composer too, so they looked at his music and checked if there was a code in there or something.

Azzo: Where were you when the wall fell?

Barbe: I've been an associate professor since 1989 at NIU. When I came here, that's when the wall fell. [I was watching it on TV and] I was bawling. It's still, for me, so emotional.

Azzo: Do you teach your students about the Berlin Wall?

Barbe: When we have certain classes, like German history, I always talk about it. We talk about my aunt who lived through a bombing in 1942 during World War II. In my classes, I like to personalize history as the history of people. I always think that makes it a little more vivid. It gets more people more involved personally in the stories.