Lauren, Erin, Alex and Cas celebrate German Day. Photo: Goodall-Heising
If you were trying to get through the atrium two Mondays ago, you would have probably encountered a mob of students and staff trying German foods, reading German posters, playing German trivia games and winning German prizes to celebrate the German Reunification. German Day is an eventful day, organized by German language students. It is intended to celebrate the reunification of East and West Germany into a single nation and to promote the German program as a whole. The reunification occurred after a chain of events in Germany and across Europe, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Iron Curtain. The actual reunification occurred on October 3, 1990 and marked the end of communism in East Germany. However, since October 3rd was on a weekend, German Day was celebrated on Monday the 4th at Hanover High.
German Day activities included general German trivia games with German gummy bear prizes; a soccer game with the exchange students from Neustadt, Germany; a bake sale, with authentic German food and deserts; t-shirt selling, with shirts that read ‘Deutsch [German] ist cool!'; and informative posters. Throughout the day, German language students were eager to give information on this monumental event.
German Day this year was a huge success. Uwe Goodall-Heising, the German teacher at HHS, said that “there was much more going on. There was a soccer match, there was a bake sale, there was a trivia game. It was just a bigger event [than last year].” The sheer amount of things to do engaged a whole range of different students. There were also many other positive opinions. “I think a lot people learned about Germany and its culture. It sparked a lot of interest in the German program in general,” says Taylor Henry, a junior. And this event could have had another positive effect. Next year, due to budget cuts, the school board is considering cutting the German program altogether. This may have been the spark in interest the German program needed in order to continue at Hanover High.
