The United States is erecting a 7-foot-tall statue of former President Ronald Reagan at its Berlin embassy after a decade of trying to persuade Berlin to honor the late president.
City officials declined numerous requests by U.S. officials and dignitaries to honor Reagan with a statue. Berlin officials argued that a statue was unnecessary because Reagan was already an honorary citizen of the city. They also said honoring Reagan would be unfair to others who also supported the city against Soviet occupation after World War II.
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grennell proposed earlier this year that instead of convincing the Berlin city government to erect the statue the U.S.s should erect one itself, according to the Wall Street Journal. The statue is now scheduled to be inaugurated on Nov. 8.
The embassy sent out a teaser trailer ahead of the news breaking about the new statue on Thursday.
Coming November 8 pic.twitter.com/XUbGYBS1Wu
— US-Botschaft Berlin (@usbotschaft) November 5, 2019
Reagan is the only U.S. president to make two trips to the Berlin Wall since it was erected in 1961. That year, Germany was split in the wake of WWII between the German Democratic Republic controlled by the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany overseen by an allied coalition of Britain, France, and the U.S.
The GDR in control of East Germany built the wall to prevent Germans from fleeing to the West. Reagan committed himself to seeing the wall torn down, and he delivered a historic speech on June 12, 1987, while standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate.
The statue will be placed on the embassy’s terrace that overlooks the spot where Reagan stood while calling on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
U.S.-Germany relations have grown more strained since Trump took office. The president has leveled heavy criticism at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, especially for working with Russia to build a pipeline that would ship Russian crude to her country.
