Paris - Hanna Gleiss doesn't remember much about the fall of the Berlin Wall except for the painted shards her parents chipped out once upon a time and kept around the house as mementos. But because of that spectacular end of the cold war two decades ago, she and her generation of East and West Germans alike can take for granted the exhilaration of studying in Paris.

I met Hanna a few days ago when her joint team of German and French university students invited me to take part in a panel at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques on the mauerfall, or "fall of the wall" in 1989. The easy camaraderie of this transnational cohort that never experienced either the cold-war division of Europe or the century-long Franco-German enmity that preceded it...