Winston Churchill Memorial and Library - "Breakthrough:" The National Churchill Museum Comes Full-Circle

"Breakthrough:" The National Churchill Museum Comes Full-Circle

On November 9, 1990, Edwina Sandys, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, introduced her sculpture "Breakthrough" to the public at the National Churchill Museum. Made from eight sections of the Berlin Wall, "Breakthrough" not only serves to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also to memorialize Churchill's "Sinews of Peace." "I had always wanted to make a sculpture for the Churchill Memorial at Westminster," Sandys said, "and this seemed the perfect moment to do something. Friends in Berlin had come back with tiny little pieces of wall, and I thought, ‘Wouldn't it be great to make a sculpture.’ I thought I'd better go straight while there was some wall left."

In 1990, with the support of Westminster College, Sandys and her husband, Richard Kaplan, had traveled to East Berlin to secure portions of the wall. Upon their arrival in Berlin, however, the couple realized the sculpture would be costly, as 4-foot (1.2 m)-wide sections were selling for $60,000 to $200,000. Fortunately, East German officials, intrigued by the idea of an erecting a Berlin Wall monument at the location of Churchill's 1946 speech, allowed Sandys to choose eight sections of the wall as a gift to Westminster College.

Sandys chose the sections from an area near the Brandenburg Gate, frequented by artists, because of the dramatic color of the graffiti. The repeated use of the word "unwahr" ("lies" or "untruths") within the sections also appealed to her. Sandys modified the original sections by cutting out large male and female silhouettes from the wall—these cuts outs exemplified the newly-opened communication between East and West. When assembled, "Breakthrough" proved to be an enormous sculpture, roughly 11 ft (3.4 m) high by 32 ft (9.8 m) ft long.

One year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sandys unveiled "Breakthrough" before a crowd of 7,000 people gathered on the campus of Westminster College. Among the gathered crowd were former President Ronald Reagan, Senator John Ashcroft, and German Minister Plenipotentiary Fritjof von Nordenskjoeld. The dedication of "Breakthrough" brought the Churchill Museum full-circle. Forty-four years after her grandfather had warned of the creation of the "iron curtain," Edwina Sandys’ sculpture commemorated the close of the Cold War.