Within weeks and months of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, numerous busts and portraits of school namesakes disappeared from the foyers, hallways, and “tradition rooms” (Traditionszimmer) of East Berlin schools and were relegated to trash bins. In 1990 municipal authorities formalized this spontaneous purge of school identities by eliminating the names of all schools in eastern Berlin. Over the course of the 1990s administrators, teachers, and students in the newly restructured schools began to discuss a wide range of new school identities.