1961
THE BERLIN WALL
______________________________________
WHEN BOUNDARIES
PREVAIL GEOGRAPHY:
American Appropriation of a Divided Berlin
Architecture and the manifestation of binary opposites:
Barkan,Sophia–Penelope
Berlin
WHEN BOUNDARIES PREVAIL GEOGRAPHY:
American Appropriation of a Divided Berlin
American postwar construction pushed the shape of the American city beyond recognition. The urban transformation inspired French philosopher, Sartre to see the American landscape as “frail and temporary, formless and unfinished {American cities are}, haunted by the presence of the immense geographic space surrounding them.”[1]Sartre’s confusion and disorientation in the American city did not become disdain but rather turned into an appreciation for a place accommodating his philosophical notions of existential emptiness. Sartre associated the American landscape with a particular sort of freedom, one of a self–determining consciousness made possible from a rejection of surrounding environments and beliefs:
Here everyone is free– not to criticize or to reform their customs– but to flee them, to leave for the desert or for another city. The cities are open, open to the world, and to the future. This is what gives them their adventurous look and even in their ugliness and disorder, a touching beauty.[2]
In Sartre’s terms, this freedom– one generated independently by the subject in an absence of immutable values, customs and authority– directly found its spatial correlate in the ephemeral and dilute physicality of the American landscape.[3] This Sartrean freedom with its notion of space and openness seems entrenched with nostalgia and myth. Some environments are not as easy to escape or reject as Sartre believed.
The city of Berlin, following the Second World War became the center of a dispute between geographically entrenched Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism. The city was split in two, and a wall was erected creating a physical separation between two political regimes, dividing the territory without consideration of the social and processional geography of German citizens.
The potentially limitless movement of people, goods, money and ideas marks our time, however, our history is rich with barriers. A border is a boundary. In Elements of Architecture, Pierre von Meiss describes a boundary as the interface between two places– a demarcation of both separation and connection.[4] Borderers divide place, clearly marking an in from the out. When demarcated, a boundary can define both micro and macro worlds. The limits of a room, a building, a site, a city, a state and a country– are all marked by the same spatial principle. Once boundaries are defined the intent is to defend them. Walls, fences, barriers, fortifications and edges protect the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside.’ Because such limits are established and thus boundaries come between two places, they also represent points of control and places of transition.
Boundaries can be seen as barriers or as places of contact. It has even been suggested that we are all “prisoners of borders”[5]– political, social, cultural, linguistic, physical, even psychological. While this statement appears somewhat exaggerated, it holds truth. Boundaries are elements in spatial organization that heavily influence daily life– not always just the people living along them. For an “inside” to exist, it must open to an “outside” to accommodate it. A border creates an interior space, which seeks homogeneity, for the purposed sake of differing from the exterior.
For centuries humans have separated themselves from one another by building walls. Hadrian’s Wall, constructed in the early years by the Romans was built to control marauding tribes from the north, therefore providing stability to the south. The Great Wall of China, another defensive structure extended 3,728 miles {6,000 km}, taking almost 2,000 years to complete, was designed to protect the Chinese Empire from Northern aggression. In medieval times, citizens in London and Paris built and rebuilt walled cities in order to maintain liberties. Our historical geography has seen numerous walled cities, however, not until the 20 thcentury have walls been used to imprison the citizens within.
The Berlin Wall was the first wall used to keep inhabitants ‘in’ rather than to keep others ‘out.’ In contrast to preceding walled cities, the Berlin Wall functioned to hold captive a population of East Germans who, according to Ronald Reagan were “imprisoned in a social system they didn’t want to be a part of.”[6] The Berlin Wall took on great significance as Berlin became the geographic place for both Soviets and Americans to showcase their respective ideologies in conflict during the Cold War. In particular, the American cause appropriated the Wall as a convenient symbol of ideological superiority. This study of the Berlin Wall aims to examine how the Walls architecture represented ideological differences between competing Cold War political systems and how the visual articulation prompted changes in American perspective.
THE WALL
Symbolic Significance of the Berlin Wall
During the Cold War, Berlin was the concrete symbol of the Western struggle against the Soviet Union. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 set down a clear line between East and West, decisively epitomizing the ‘imaginative geography’[7] of the Cold War. For Americans the wall signified in microcosm the Cold War division of the world. Prior to 1961, Americans lacked a visual to illustrate conflicting Cold War political ideologies. One might even go so far as to say without the visual East/ West contrast the Berlin Wall created, the Cold War ideological battle could have lost its potency and steam in the public sphere. Before the erection of the wall, differences between Soviet and American economic postwar policies were apparent, however, the juxtaposition of ideologies illuminated by a divided Berlin, produced both a visual depiction and a reality Americans previously lacked. The Berlin Wall, through the architecture of its walls provided the world with a physical manifestation of the existing ideological differences and thus concretized Winston Churchill’s famous metaphor of the ‘iron curtain.’
The geographic division of the Wall marked the ideological divide between Communism and Capitalism. The wall remained intact for twenty–eight years separating the Eastern sector of Berlin from the West. Although built by the Communist East German government to stop the mass emigration of refugees fleeing East Berlin, the amount of symbolism the wall acquired while it stood, transcended the intention behind its construction. Presidents, diplomats, journalists, novelists, film makers, musicians and theologians reacted to the existence of the wall not only as a political phenomenon but also as a metaphor penetrating deeply into the public discourse and imagination. The Berlin Wall has been represented in a spectrum of media– from songs about ‘the wall of shame,’ to stories about the white crosses memorializing East German citizens killed by border guards as they tried to escape to freedom.
This study of the Berlin Wall aims to examine how the Walls architecture represented ideological differences between competing Cold War political systems and how the visual articulation prompted changes in American perspective. Referring to Mary Bah Stein, the Berlin Wall acted as a “superimposed boundary.”[8] The Wall was a specific geographical place of “hybridity and struggle, policing and transgression.”[9] The architecture dividing East from West Berlin affected American views of the Soviet Union and the Communist system by supplying the West with a very specific idea of, referring again to Stein, ‘binary opposites.’ The Berlin Wall manifested differences between us and them, Communism and Capitalism, East and West and ‘in’ versus ‘out.’ It was in part because The Wall created such contrasting opposites American perspectives shifted during the latter years of the Cold War.
The Berlin Wall stimulated a coexistence of both ‘imaginary’ and ‘real’ discourses, all of which participated in the production of the Wall’s historical meaning. While the Wall stood, myriad cultural dialogues shaped its perception and altered its existence in the public sphere. Consequently, The Berlin Wall has been used as a symbol and a metaphor in both the political and the imaginary space of public discourse. The Berlin Wall transcended the political realm and became a cultural phenomenon capturing varied public reactions. As Stein says, “walls divide up space, and in doing so they create places that are bounded, claimed, named, and contested.”[10] Boundaries, according to scholars from diverse disciplines: (political, geographical, psycho–geographical, anthropological, folklore), not only create physical space but also recreate a cultural identity. Boundaries reorganize identity; according to Benedict they also construct “imagined communities.”[11] Notions of both space and architecture have become politicized. Berlin was divided along political territory lines without any concern for German citizens.
The Berlin Wall was a “superimposed boundary,”[12] and because it was constructed with such force The Wall created an even more specific “imaginative geography.”[13] The West specifically had a moral and mental image of Berlin, which played well to reinforce Western feelings of superiority. In Western popular imagination, East Berlin was a drab grey zone of diminished value. Referencing popular American journalistic jargon, the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall embodied a “no trespassing death–strip”[14] where constricting metal fences, alarms, armed guards, trip wires, search lights and automatic shooting devices illustrated the fatality of the wall. The sheer physicality of the death–strip as an abandoned but threatening no–mans land reinforced the seriousness of trying to escape and the extent East Germans were willing to go to keep hold of their population.
During the Cold War period various constructions of the Soviet Union existed in the Western academic sphere. One of the pervasive thought recreated the Soviets as an Asiatic and barbaric political power “which availed itself of the opportunity offered by World War II to intrude into Europe by military means.”[15] According to Churchill, Soviet presence in Europe threatened the global balance when, “a barbarian stood at the heart of Europe.”[16]The following year, Konrad Adenauer wrote William Sollmann saying, “Asia stands on the Elbe,”[17] implying that measures should be taken to halt any such threats to civilized Europe. Similarly, L’abbé Dominique-Géorges-Frédéric de Pradt exhorted Europeans to close ranks and gates against the Russians:
Russia is built up despotically and asiatically [...] Europe must draw closer together and as she shuts herself up, Europe should cooperate in outlawing all participation in her affairs by any power which does not have a direct interest in them and which has the force to weigh down the balance to suit her own interests.[18]
This Asiatic and barbaric construction of the Soviet Union transcended politics also dominating academic literature. De Reynold wrote, “Russia cannot be judged by Western measures and there exists a primordial geographical antithesis between Europe and Russia, where the former is sedentary and thus civilized, while the latter is nomadic and thus barbarian.”[19] The theme of the barbarian invading Europe is also noted by Milan Kundera’s phrase in Un Occidente Kidnapp é, where the West is occupied by Russians.[20]According to Kundera, Soviet occupation meant European civilization was under siege by Soviet barbarians.
The distinguishing trait of the so–called Barbarians was their political–economic system. This distinction created a hierarchy where the industrialized West became the First World, the Communist became the Second World and everyone else, the Third World. This stigma and hierarchical classification scheme of civilized, barbarian to savage was largely economically motivated and drew heavily on the symbol of the Great Wall of China.
The Great Wall of China was built by ‘cultured’ people to keep ‘barbarians’ at bay. In contrast, the Berlin Wall was built by ‘barbarians’ resisting ‘culture.’[21] According to the West, the Wall became a concrete symbol of an Eastern weakness and “its lack of faith in its own ability to withstand that attraction.”[22] This notion of the barbarian and the cultured mirrors the Communist politico–economic model equating it with Nazi totalitarianism. This dichotomy added to the notion of “binary opposites,”[23] where the civilized competed with the barbarian, the free against the oppressed, the East versus the West and the, defensive versus the offensive.
BERLIN
Constructing Division
Cities play very distinct roles in history– they constantly change to reflect the social, cultural, political and architectural relationships of their inhabitants. No other twentieth century city has experienced more change, tumult or controversy than Berlin. Berlin remains perhaps one of the most complex and politically charged urban areas in Europe.
In the 1930s, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer designed architectural plans for a New Berlin, a city to honor their leader, Adolph Hitler. The architects aimed to recreate a city, “more beautiful than Paris, more splendid than Vienna and more powerful than ancient Rome.”[24] Their dream of a New Berlin ceased to exist, as Berlin was reduced to dust after German defeat during the Second World War. In the place of beauty was destruction and devastation, and what was left of the prewar Berlin was divided into four sections by victors of the war.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis states the most striking anomaly of the Cold War was “the existence of a divided Europe, within which there resided a divided Germany, within which there lay a divided Berlin.”[25] The allied victory over Nazi Germany brought hope for peace in a united Europe. However, in Berlin, a collision point on the map between two systems, a fierce rivalry arose over the urban reconstruction and Berlin became the focus of ambitious rebuilding programs– by both the Soviets and the Allied Forces. The Federal Republic, backed by the United States, France and Britain aimed to turn West Berlin into a living example of Western superiority. They wanted democracy to rise out of the very heart of Hitler’s city, rebuilding Berlin into a state where freedom would be insured and the individual could elect whomever he chose to govern. In addition to creating a democratic governing body, West Berlin was to host a thriving capitalist economy. The East German government was equally determined to transform East Berlin, which it had always referred to as Berlin– Capital of the GDR into a showcase of Communist power and progression.[26] Backed by the Soviet Union, East Berlin aimed to further extend communist ideology into European cities by rebuilding Berlin as a Socialist Republic. This postwar reconstruction disagreement extinguished any and all notions of a peaceful future for Berlin and ultimately set the stage for the erection of the Berlin Wall.
The United States, Britain and France governed the Western section of Berlin while the Soviets ruled the East. Berlin, capital of the West’s “despised adversary”[27] became the focal point of the Cold War. There are myriad reasons Berlin symbolized this division: because the US government was at fault by not dictating peace in Berlin during WWI and therefore could have possibly prevented German aggression; because Berlin visually rendered the ideological conflict between political extremes; because of Soviet–claimed territories in Eastern Europe and Winston Churchill’s explanation of the Iron Curtain; or perhaps because of the glorified American memory of the United States’ credibility in Berlin after the 1948 Airlift. The 1948 Airlift in Berlin was the event that transformed American ideas about West Berliners from “beaten and despised foes into allies” during the ever–intensifying Cold War.[28]Regardless, no Cold War city other than Berlin “symbolized more vividly the unnatural division of Europe; no other kept the idea of one Germany and one Europe alive.”[29] Berlin was more than a city. Throughout history, Berlin has come to have a human character, embodying “a political culture with human qualities, both good and ill, somehow inherent in the character of Western Society. Paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, we are all Berliners.”[30]
Berlin’s importance to the United States was highly documented during the Cold War. A presentation given at the end of May by JFK to the Department of State stated, “the present importance of the city for our foreign policy can scarcely be exaggerated. Since 1948, we have, by our own choice, made Berlin the example and the symbol of our determination and our ability to defend the free parts of the world against Communist aggression.”[31] In response to Kennedy, Secretary of State, Dean Rusk furthering Berlin’s importance, stated, “West Berlin is a lighthouse of freedom in a dark totalitarian sea… It is a shining model of political, intellectual, and spiritual freedom in which individual liberties are assured and the people choose those who govern them.”[32] Before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War lacked any visual depiction, yet once the East German Government built the wall, American diplomats made The Berlin Wall’s significance quite clear.
THE WALL
The Berlin Wall and the American Administration
Basic Facts (at the time of July 31, 1989)
Total border length around West Berlin: 96 mi / 155 km
Border between East and West Berlin: 27 mi / 43.1 km
Border between West Berlin and East Germany: 69 mi / 111.9 km
Border through residential areas in Berlin: 23 mi / 37 km
Concrete segment wall: 3.6m (11.81 ft.) high, 66 mi / 106 km
Wire mesh fencing: 41 mi / 66.5 km
Anti-vehicle trenches: 65 mi / 105.5 km
Contact or signal fence: 79 mi / 127.5 kmColumn track: 6-7 m (7.33 yd) wide, 77 mi / 124.3 km
Number of watch towers: 302
Number of bunkers: 20Persons killed on the Berlin Wall: 192
Persons injured by shooting: ca. 200[33]
Die Grenze ist geschlossen
The border is closed.
On August 13 th, 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected, dividing East from West Berlin. Preceding 1961, the GDR had lost hundreds of thousands of its most talented citizens to the West. The exodus caused panic in the East, as it inferred a failure of the Socialist Utopia. Not only was the necessity of the Wall to keep East Berliners from fleeing a humiliating sign on the part of the Communist system, loosing so many workers to the West caused a huge labor shortage. Documented by East German officials, “bosses, collegues, friends were there one day and absent the next.”[34] Assembly lines were brought to a halt because the critical workers had left for the West in search of better opportunities. In an effort to halt migration, the border was sealed and a barricade was built intending to keep its citizens from escaping. According to Lapp, “the Berlin Wall was 13.6 meters tall, 11.6 km of the border around Berlin was walled. There were 124.9 km of electric fence, a 124– km road along the death strip for patrol cars and bikes, 258 dog runs, 298 watch towers and 52 bunkers.”[35] The wall had a visual strength and force bearing additional symbolism, as the sheer physical force of the wall implied the serious crime of leaving the republic. At Potsdamer Platz a sign was placed on the wall, “Wer die Staatsgrenze mit Gewalt einrenen will, wer an der Mauer provoiert, macht ales nur schlimmer!”– “Whoever threatens by force this authorized National Border, Whoever commits acts of provocation at the Wall, will only make matters worse!”[36] Though no one in the Kremlin liked the idea of building a wall to divide Berlin, East German officials were unable to stop the population movement into the Western Sector. After various laws, bans and restrictions failed, the Wall was built and the borders were sealed.
The Kennedy administration denounced the development of the Wall but did nothing to respond to its construction. At a fundraising dinner Kennedy publicly stated, “The fact of the matter is that in the last 12 months we have seen more clearly than ever before the contrast between our system and that of those who make themselves our adversaries. The wall in Berlin, to lock people in, I believe is the obvious manifestation, which can be demonstrated all over the world, of the superiority of our system.”[37] In private, however, Kennedy stated, “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”[38] Though Kennedy expressed moral uncertainty regarding the Wall, it served the pragmatic purpose of highlighting the superiorities and benefits of American freedom.
The construction of the wall provided stark commentary on the Cold War ideology and shifted American perspectives on Germany, the Soviet Union– and even themselves. Many Americans saw the wall as an effort on behalf of the Soviet Union to remove the most basic freedoms by restricting movement and communication with all other parts of the world. To Americans its “very construction was an admission of failure on the part of the East Germany’s communist system to provide for the basic necessities of life.”[39] This notion was perpetuated with stories about desperate escapes from the East. Americans appropriated the brutality of the Wall as a metaphor. The Wall showed the geographical dichotomy between freedom and repression. The Wall was called ‘Wall of Shame,’ and ‘Anti–fascist bulwark.’ This prompted the West to see West Berlin as a “beacon of liberty in the Red Sea” and, using the jargon favored by Western journalists during the Cold War, “the shop window of freedom.”[40] The depth of history and division in Berlin inspired writer Peter Hall to choose Berlin as his ideal city “for its extraordinary feeling of nostalgia for the Weimar years, the haunting memories of a hundred spy stories, and the promise of a new golden age, already erupting in the Spaunder Vorstadt.”[41]
The modern city treats boundaries between different places with subtlety in an attempt to neutralize the borders between its different spaces.[42]Before the erection of the Wall, this was true for the divided Berlin. As Dulles describes it, “Except for signs indicating that one was leaving the Western sectors, it was not obvious when one crossed over the line. On the subway and the elevated train, newcomers frequently entered the East sector without being aware that they were in a different jurisdiction.”[43] With the erection of the Wall, however, the boundary between East and West was anything but neutral. In fact, the Berlin Wall, modeled after the Chinese Wall, was intended not only to prevent GDR citizens from escaping to the West but also, like the Great Wall Of China, to prevent a free flow of “Western influence.”
EAST + WEST
Visual Differences Between Communist and Capitalist Ideologies
A highly differentiated architectural landscape in Berlin made American symbolic appropriation possible. The Cold War rivalry of the conflicting ideological systems extended to the realm of post–war urban reconstruction and architectural planning. Because the Federal Republic aimed to turn Berlin into an example of Western superiority and the East Germans were equally vested in showcasing their talents architecture became a competitive outlet. The Mercedez Benz building in the Western Sector aimed to out do the construction of the Television Tower in East Berlin.
In East Berlin the Soviets pushed a grand historicism that was supposed to reflect the heroic spirit of triumphant masses. As explained in a Russian planning document, in “structure and architectural form, the city is the expression of political life and the national consciousness of the people.”[44] The East German government attempted to match this ideal by constructing the Stalin Allee, an eighty–meter wide boulevard of massive and modern sevenstory buildings, running through Friedrichshain.[45] The Stalin Alle was designed by Hermann Henselmann to serve as a template for other grand streets in East Berlin. He aimed to transform East Berlin into a showcase of Communist progress and power, creating a notable and enviable landmark of East Berlin. Originally named Frankfurter Allee, it was renamed the Stalin Allee in 1949 after Joseph Stalin.
The first buildings on the boulevard were designed by Ludmilla Herzenstein and built between 1949 and 50. They were formalist and unadorned: five–story, cemented blocks inspired by the German modernist Bauhaus tradition of the 1920s. While The Stalin Allee was supposed to be a template for all other upcoming grand streets in East Berlin, it did not have a lasting influence. After Stalin’s death the GDR rejected the Bauhaus style in favor of a more progressive architectural approach, leaving the Stalin Allee a “white elephant” in the East Berlin landscape. This opened for a conscious return to national and local style, favoring Berlin neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. According to Ladd, East German buildings in 1951 incorporated “an amalgam of Schinkel and Stalin.”[46] In contrast to the earlier simple and boxy apartment style of the Bauhaus, the newer and larger buildings were generously proportioned and more richly ornamented with neoclassical details. The bases were clad with stone and elaborately pillared. The entrances of newer apartments were decorated with ceramic titles from Meißen. Newer buildings mirrored the hope for an emerging society in which ordinary workers would enjoy the comforts of the old bourgeoisie.[47] By doing away with the 1920s Bauhaus style in favor for a more contemporary Stalin–Baroque style, the GDR tried to showcase Communist power and convince fellow Berliners about the superiority of the Eastern block.
New Communist construction in the center of East Berlin was conspicuously absent prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall. They did, however, demolish the Eastern signature building, the Prussian Royal Palace. Ulbricht dreamed of building a giant skyscraper in its place, but instead the site was converted into a stage for mass rallies. In the late 60s to 70s, most of the prominent historical landmarks were replaced with buildings and monuments showcasing the new and forward–looking era. After the Royal Palace was in place in 1962, the GDR blew up Schinkel’s Bauakademie, which was previously one of Schinkel’s finest pieces of his oeuvre and replaced it with the GDR Foreign Ministry, an eleven–story white slab with abstract aluminum sculptures covering its façade.[48] The Television Tower, the GDR’s tallest structure, reaching 365 meters tall was built to out do West Berliner architectural monuments. The Television Tower, know to most as, ‘giant asparagus’ replaced the historic Alexanderplatz as GDR planners sought to erect monuments honoring socialist notions of functionalism.
Similarly, the postwar architecture in West Berlin sought to showcase Western superiority and ability– illustrating the benefits of Capitalist ideology. In the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial part of West Berlin’s cultural budget went into the construction of new buildings, according to urban planners, new and modern buildings symbolized and facilitated political transformation. The West wanted its architecture to convey the Federal Republic’s commitment to internationalism, egalitarianism, individualism and freedom. The West utilized the expressive International Style, which at the time was sweeping across postwar Western Europe and America and appeared politically progressive. The construction materials used to construct new buildings had to be politically correct: in place of the previously used stone or brick, Western architects used glass and steel. Thus, West Berlin was covered with ‘democratic’ glass boxes– which, according to city officials gave West Berlin a city center with trademark buildings, contemporary monuments and a very distinctive urban flair. In the ruins of the Gedächtniskirche, architect Egon Eiermann added a hexagonal tower honeycombed with dark glass in order to represent the common reconstruction attitude of “the new rising from the old.”[49]
In the 1960s, West Berlin lacked traces of WWII, as most of the aftermath of war had been cleared and most of the demolished buildings, rebuilt. In a portrait of Berlin at the time, the Western sector is described:
West Berlin, with a population of 2 million, the rubble of war had mostly been cleared away. Lights shone at night down the Kurfursten Damm, which was lined with smart shops and street cafes. Kempinski’s served famous ice–cream sundaes. One of the first Hilton hotels in Europe dominated the skyline. Theatres, concert halls, and nightclubs were packed. Many loved the busy, throbbing, cosmopolitan air of the city; others found it hectic, frantic.[50]
Because of the Western commitment to overpowering communism in Europe, the Western sector of Berlin had reaped benefits of the Western capitalist economy. In the Western popular imagination, East Berlin was depicted as a zone of diminished value. The drab grey of East Berlin’s surface area enticed few travelers A 1960s portrait of East Berlin shows societal effects of the opposing Cold War ideology:
Through the Brandenburg Gate, East Berlin was another world. The vast boulevard of the Unter den Linden, still elegant, was largely deserted. The huge Soviet Embassy stood on one side. Farther along, the destruction the war had brought was still visible. Buildings stood derelict, next to empty spaces where others had been destroyed. Posters everywhere proclaimed, “Build the Socialist Fatherland.” While everyone was fed and housed, the million people in East Berlin looked far from prosperous. In the drab new apartment blocks the services worked, but they were at a basic level. An East Berliner who could afford the luxury of a refrigerator would have to wait a year for one; for a washing machine, the wait was two years. Cars were not to be had on any waiting list. Consumer goods took no priority in an economy geared to earning necessary foreign currency through exports.[51]
Images and perceptions of East Berlin are similar to depictions of the Berlin Wall. In popular media The Berlin Wall and East Germany are both illustrated as desolate and abandoned spaces. The Eastern Sector of Berlin is depicted as a place to escape from.
THE FALLThe Berlin Wall & Consumerism
The architecture or lack of architecture created by The Berlin Wall, separating East from West Berlin symbolized many forms of ‘binary opposites.’ The Wall, dividing Berlin for 28 years, manifested differences between us and them, Communism and Capitalism, East and West and ‘in’ versus ‘out.’ As a ‘superimposed boundary,’ The Wall inspired both ‘imaginary’ and ‘real’ discourses. Yet, regardless of the symbolism the Wall acquired as it divided Berlin, fundamentally, The Berlin Wall was a border.
Borders divide space, clearly marking and excluding an ‘in’ from an ‘out.’ A border creates an interior space, which seeks homogeneity, for the purposed sake of differing from the exterior. Once boundaries are defined the intent is to defend them. Therefore, walls represent a larger power dynamic. According to Samson, “without the authority and power to make them function, walls cannot act as barriers, far less as serious fences; they are neutral without the social relations to makes them work.”[52]Samson continues, “the symbolic function of town walls is reflected by Gregory of Tours’ belief that their collapse was an unmistakable sign that the king would die.”[53] Erich Honecker a Soviet planner and architect is often called the King of East Berlin. When The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 so did King Erich. History overtook Erich Honecker and the coming decade demanded not the hero of the Wall’s construction but instead a hero of its deconstruction. The notion of a King of deconstruction according to Enzenberger “represents not victory, conquest and triumph, but renunciation and dismantling.”[54] The border between East and West Berlin opened on November 9 th, 1989. On November 10 th, two West German newspapers lying side by side read, ‘The Wall Has Fallen’ and ‘Bonn calls for the demolition of the Wall.’[55] In a journal from 1989 a West Berliner noted, “both were correct. The Wall was there and it no longer existed.”[56] The fall of The Wall reinforced the notion of imaginative geographies The Wall acquired as it stood. Noted by Gottfried Korff, after the fall of The Wall, Berlin became “a situation in which the past was negated, erased, cast aside, but the future hadn’t yet begun.”
The fall of The Wall marked the end of the Cold War and the victory of Capitalism over Communism– it also became the “eighth wonder of the world in the West.”[57] Symbolic elements of the fall of The Wall dominated Western media and were immediately appropriated into Western culture. More importantly the remains of the Berlin Wall were immediately available for sale. After 1989 images of The Berlin Wall materialized around the United States–as images of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Communism were used as the backdrops for multiple advertising campaigns. In 1990 the Pepsi Corporation made a commercial about giving the gift of freedom. Images of happy citizens, cheering and laughing as they tore down the oppressive Wall that divided their city for almost three decades reached every American television set. After a recap of political events happening in Berlin a message crosses the television: ‘give the gift of freedom, drink Pepsi.’ Similarly, A T & T borrowed political documentary footage recorded as East and West Berliners tore down The Wall to sell telephones. A T & T promoted telephone sales and communication by addressing the oppressive restrictions put on communication by the Eastern Bloc.
Television played a very integral role in the events of 1989. Overwhelmingly, the images showed a triumphant joy as citizens destroyed the physical Wall with pick–axes and crowbars. The sheer pleasure of climbing onto the once death–trap and chipping away parts of the former Soviet prison overwhelmed American televisions.
Before the architecture of the Berlin Wall was completely eradicated from history, it became a tourist attraction. For 5 deutsche marks you could buy a piece of the Berlin Wall and for 20 deutsche marks you could rent a hammer or chisel and take pieces of The Wall for yourself. The consumer demand for fragments of the wall introduced a new profession to the German job market. Wall–peckers made enough money to support themselves by chipping authentic cuts from the Berlin Wall and selling them to tourists.
According to a Canadian Wall–pecker, owning pieces of the Wall was similar to owning history: “I knew everybody in the world was watching history happening here and that’s when I got the idea. I figured people would love to have a piece of that history, too. So I bought a hammer and chisel and started knocking off pieces of the Wall to sell back home.”[58] Even Reagan needed to take a piece. At a visit to the Wall, Reagan reported, “you have to touch The Wall to believe its reality” and you have to strike against The Wall to feel its destruction. [59]
The mass consumption of The Berlin Wall demanded mass production. When the supply of Wall fragments with genuine graffiti stopped the demand remained and the profit margins grew. After Wall–peckers chiseled all of the graffiti on the Western side of the Wall fragments were chipped from any section of the Wall and spray painted a matching color. Wall–peckers forged history. The small pieces of what was left of the Mauer, over which an estimated 200 East German citizens were killed while trying to escape to the West were being forged and sold as tourist attractions. The Berlin Wall was consumed by little purchases made at family souvenir stalls in our postmodern era when we seek to own history. Naturally owning history will always remain out of reach. Daniel Miller explains that the desire to personalize, to appropriate and finally to recontextualize objects is a prime motivation for consuming them.[60]
The sale of Berlin Wall fragments epitomized the com–modification of history. According to James Mayo, “when objects and events are separated from history, good or bad they express war history without explaining or justifying a war’s cause.”[61] This popular fascination and desire to own pieces of The Wall invokes problematic issues surrounding relics, where according to Young, by taking ownership of relics they loose all value: “suggest themselves as fragments of events, inviting us to mistake the debris of history for history itself.”[62] Regardless, pieces of the same Wall that divided families, crushed apartment buildings and caged its public in a prison–like environment for almost 30 years were available for purchase minutes after the fall of The Wall was announced and months before any unification planning began in Berlin.
President George Bush similarly used an exploitative appropriation of The Berlin Wall as he addressed the Republican Convention in Houston, Texas in August 1992. Within the framework of Bush’s presidential campaign, the stone provided concrete historical evidence that he, the President of the United States, was the leader of the free world. Consequently, his historical mission was to bring a ‘new world order’ to the new post Cold War world. Though Berlin Wall memorabilia flooded the free market and buying pieces of The Wall was quite easy, President Bush got his piece from Germany’s external affairs minister Hans–Dietrich Genscher. This exchange as observed by Lori Turner recreated pieces of The Wall, “into trophies reserved for the winners of the Cold War. They mark the victory of a political idea.”[63] The Cold War was ultimately a multi–faceted competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War marked these competitions, for more advanced arms, in the space race, for more powerful alliances, etc. Thus, it makes perfect sense that the ‘winner’ of the ideologically motivated Cold War would receive a trophy.
[1] Sartre, Jean–Paul. ‘American Cities,’ in The City: American Experience, eds. Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 207
[2] Sartre, Jean–Paul. ‘American Cities,’ in The City: American Experience, eds. Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 210
[3] Sartre, Jean–Paul. ‘American Cities,’ in The City: American Experience, eds. Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 211
[4] Meiss, Pierre von. Elements of Architecture: From form to place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 78
[5] Dean, Tacita. AT WORKS, Place. London: Thames & Hudson. 2005. 27
[6] Ronald Reagan as qtd. Wyden, Peter. Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin.New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. 123
[7] Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 54
[8] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[9] Clifford, James. Traveling Cultures , in Cultural Studies ed. Lawerence Grossberg, Carry Nelson and Paula Treichler. Routledge. London: 1992. 109
[10] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[11] Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 1991. 6
[12] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[13] Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 54
[14] Waldenberg, Hermann. The Berlin Wall Book. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. 120
[15] Charlton, Michael. The Eagle and the Small Birds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984.
[16] Charlton, Michael. The Eagle and the Small Birds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984.
[17] Adenauer, Konrad Briefe, 1945-1947. Edited by Hans Peter Mensing. Berlin: 1983.
[18] Cadot, Michel. “L’image de la Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française.” Paris: Fayard. 1839/56 (1967)
[19] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[20] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[21] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[22] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[23] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[24] Craig, Gordon A. “Berlin, the Hauptstadt: Back where it belongs.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/ August, (1998). 166
[25] Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 115
[26] Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 115
[27] May, Ernest R. “America’s Berlin: Heart of the Cold War.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/August, (1998). 148
[28] Craig, Gordon A. “Berlin, the Hauptstadt: Back where it belongs.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/ August, (1998). 166
[29] Bertram, Christoph. “Germany Moves On: Laying Angst to Rest.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/August, (1998). 186
[30] Presidental Address in Berlin, June 23, 1963. POF, JFKL, Box 45.
[31] The United States Position on Berlin, May 29, 1961. National Security Files, John F. Kennedy, JFKL, 81.1
[32] “Berlin–1961: A Pamphlet setting forth some of the basic facts about Berlin, the repeated assaults on its freedom and out obligations” Dean Rusk, August 18, (1961), 28, POF, JFKL, 116a
[33] The Wall, Press and Information Office of Land Berlin 2000/2001
[34] Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 74
[35] Lapp, P.J. Frontdienst im Frieden: Die Greztruppen der DDR. Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe. 1987
[36] Balfour, Alan. Berlin, The Politics of Order 1737– 1989. Rizzoli International. New York: 1990. 194
[37] John F. Kennedy, vol. 1962, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Washington D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1963. 77
[38] Gelb, Norman. The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushev , and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe. New York: Dorset Press, 1990.
[39] Gelb, Norman. The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushev , and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe. New York: Dorset Press, 1990.
[40] Church, George. “Freedom! The Wall crumbles overnight, Berliners embrace in joy, and a stunned world ponders the consequences.” TIME MAGAZINE 20, November 1989.
[41] Hall, Peter. “Ideal Cities: Thirteen Writers Describe the City that Comes Closest to Perfection.”18 September, 1992. 30
[42] Sennett, Richard. “The Body and the City. Looking for Live Space in the Modern Townscape,” TLS, September, 1992. 3-4
[43] Wilson, Elizabeth. Architecture and Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley 1991. 98
[44] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[45] Neue Architektur. Ed. Deutsches Architektur Centrum. (1990-2000). Berlin: jovis, 2000.
[46] Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997. 183
[47] Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997. 183
[48] Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997 Last Chapter.
[49] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[50] Klaus, Larres. International Affairs Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 2001) Royal Institute of International Affairs (1944), 1002-1003
[51] Klaus, Larres. International Affairs Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 2001) Royal Institute of International Affairs (1944), 1002-1003
[52] Sampson, R. Knowledge, Power and Constraint in Inaction: the defenseless medieval wall. 1992, 41
[53] Sampson, R. Knowledge, Power and Constraint in Inaction: the defenseless medieval wall. 1992, 42
[54] Enzenberger, H. M. The State of Europe, in 1989. 137
[55] Darnton, R. Der letzte Tanz auf der Mauer: Berliner Journal 1989–1990.Munchen. 1991
[56] Darnton, R. Der letzte Tanz auf der Mauer: Berliner Journal 1989–1990. Munchen. 1991
[57] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[58] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[59] Qtd. Ragean. “Freedom! The Wall crumbles overnight, Berliners embrace in joy, and a stunned world ponders the consequences.” TIME MAGAZINE 20, November 1989.
[60] Miller, Daniel. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Basil. 1987
[61] James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscapes: The American Experience and Beyond New York: Praeger, 1988, 6
[62] James Young, “The Veneration of Ruins,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6(1993):278.(41.)
[63] Turner, Lori. “The Berlin Wall: Fragment as Commodity,” Border/Lines 19(1990):3
THE BERLIN WALL
______________________________________
WHEN BOUNDARIES
PREVAIL GEOGRAPHY:
American Appropriation of a Divided Berlin
Architecture and the manifestation of binary opposites:
Barkan,Sophia–Penelope
Berlin
WHEN BOUNDARIES PREVAIL GEOGRAPHY:
American Appropriation of a Divided Berlin
American postwar construction pushed the shape of the American city beyond recognition. The urban transformation inspired French philosopher, Sartre to see the American landscape as “frail and temporary, formless and unfinished {American cities are}, haunted by the presence of the immense geographic space surrounding them.”[1]Sartre’s confusion and disorientation in the American city did not become disdain but rather turned into an appreciation for a place accommodating his philosophical notions of existential emptiness. Sartre associated the American landscape with a particular sort of freedom, one of a self–determining consciousness made possible from a rejection of surrounding environments and beliefs:
Here everyone is free– not to criticize or to reform their customs– but to flee them, to leave for the desert or for another city. The cities are open, open to the world, and to the future. This is what gives them their adventurous look and even in their ugliness and disorder, a touching beauty.[2]
In Sartre’s terms, this freedom– one generated independently by the subject in an absence of immutable values, customs and authority– directly found its spatial correlate in the ephemeral and dilute physicality of the American landscape.[3] This Sartrean freedom with its notion of space and openness seems entrenched with nostalgia and myth. Some environments are not as easy to escape or reject as Sartre believed.
The city of Berlin, following the Second World War became the center of a dispute between geographically entrenched Western Capitalism and Soviet Communism. The city was split in two, and a wall was erected creating a physical separation between two political regimes, dividing the territory without consideration of the social and processional geography of German citizens.
The potentially limitless movement of people, goods, money and ideas marks our time, however, our history is rich with barriers. A border is a boundary. In Elements of Architecture, Pierre von Meiss describes a boundary as the interface between two places– a demarcation of both separation and connection.[4] Borderers divide place, clearly marking an in from the out. When demarcated, a boundary can define both micro and macro worlds. The limits of a room, a building, a site, a city, a state and a country– are all marked by the same spatial principle. Once boundaries are defined the intent is to defend them. Walls, fences, barriers, fortifications and edges protect the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside.’ Because such limits are established and thus boundaries come between two places, they also represent points of control and places of transition.
Boundaries can be seen as barriers or as places of contact. It has even been suggested that we are all “prisoners of borders”[5]– political, social, cultural, linguistic, physical, even psychological. While this statement appears somewhat exaggerated, it holds truth. Boundaries are elements in spatial organization that heavily influence daily life– not always just the people living along them. For an “inside” to exist, it must open to an “outside” to accommodate it. A border creates an interior space, which seeks homogeneity, for the purposed sake of differing from the exterior.
For centuries humans have separated themselves from one another by building walls. Hadrian’s Wall, constructed in the early years by the Romans was built to control marauding tribes from the north, therefore providing stability to the south. The Great Wall of China, another defensive structure extended 3,728 miles {6,000 km}, taking almost 2,000 years to complete, was designed to protect the Chinese Empire from Northern aggression. In medieval times, citizens in London and Paris built and rebuilt walled cities in order to maintain liberties. Our historical geography has seen numerous walled cities, however, not until the 20 thcentury have walls been used to imprison the citizens within.
The Berlin Wall was the first wall used to keep inhabitants ‘in’ rather than to keep others ‘out.’ In contrast to preceding walled cities, the Berlin Wall functioned to hold captive a population of East Germans who, according to Ronald Reagan were “imprisoned in a social system they didn’t want to be a part of.”[6] The Berlin Wall took on great significance as Berlin became the geographic place for both Soviets and Americans to showcase their respective ideologies in conflict during the Cold War. In particular, the American cause appropriated the Wall as a convenient symbol of ideological superiority. This study of the Berlin Wall aims to examine how the Walls architecture represented ideological differences between competing Cold War political systems and how the visual articulation prompted changes in American perspective.
THE WALL
Symbolic Significance of the Berlin Wall
During the Cold War, Berlin was the concrete symbol of the Western struggle against the Soviet Union. The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 set down a clear line between East and West, decisively epitomizing the ‘imaginative geography’[7] of the Cold War. For Americans the wall signified in microcosm the Cold War division of the world. Prior to 1961, Americans lacked a visual to illustrate conflicting Cold War political ideologies. One might even go so far as to say without the visual East/ West contrast the Berlin Wall created, the Cold War ideological battle could have lost its potency and steam in the public sphere. Before the erection of the wall, differences between Soviet and American economic postwar policies were apparent, however, the juxtaposition of ideologies illuminated by a divided Berlin, produced both a visual depiction and a reality Americans previously lacked. The Berlin Wall, through the architecture of its walls provided the world with a physical manifestation of the existing ideological differences and thus concretized Winston Churchill’s famous metaphor of the ‘iron curtain.’
The geographic division of the Wall marked the ideological divide between Communism and Capitalism. The wall remained intact for twenty–eight years separating the Eastern sector of Berlin from the West. Although built by the Communist East German government to stop the mass emigration of refugees fleeing East Berlin, the amount of symbolism the wall acquired while it stood, transcended the intention behind its construction. Presidents, diplomats, journalists, novelists, film makers, musicians and theologians reacted to the existence of the wall not only as a political phenomenon but also as a metaphor penetrating deeply into the public discourse and imagination. The Berlin Wall has been represented in a spectrum of media– from songs about ‘the wall of shame,’ to stories about the white crosses memorializing East German citizens killed by border guards as they tried to escape to freedom.
This study of the Berlin Wall aims to examine how the Walls architecture represented ideological differences between competing Cold War political systems and how the visual articulation prompted changes in American perspective. Referring to Mary Bah Stein, the Berlin Wall acted as a “superimposed boundary.”[8] The Wall was a specific geographical place of “hybridity and struggle, policing and transgression.”[9] The architecture dividing East from West Berlin affected American views of the Soviet Union and the Communist system by supplying the West with a very specific idea of, referring again to Stein, ‘binary opposites.’ The Berlin Wall manifested differences between us and them, Communism and Capitalism, East and West and ‘in’ versus ‘out.’ It was in part because The Wall created such contrasting opposites American perspectives shifted during the latter years of the Cold War.
The Berlin Wall stimulated a coexistence of both ‘imaginary’ and ‘real’ discourses, all of which participated in the production of the Wall’s historical meaning. While the Wall stood, myriad cultural dialogues shaped its perception and altered its existence in the public sphere. Consequently, The Berlin Wall has been used as a symbol and a metaphor in both the political and the imaginary space of public discourse. The Berlin Wall transcended the political realm and became a cultural phenomenon capturing varied public reactions. As Stein says, “walls divide up space, and in doing so they create places that are bounded, claimed, named, and contested.”[10] Boundaries, according to scholars from diverse disciplines: (political, geographical, psycho–geographical, anthropological, folklore), not only create physical space but also recreate a cultural identity. Boundaries reorganize identity; according to Benedict they also construct “imagined communities.”[11] Notions of both space and architecture have become politicized. Berlin was divided along political territory lines without any concern for German citizens.
The Berlin Wall was a “superimposed boundary,”[12] and because it was constructed with such force The Wall created an even more specific “imaginative geography.”[13] The West specifically had a moral and mental image of Berlin, which played well to reinforce Western feelings of superiority. In Western popular imagination, East Berlin was a drab grey zone of diminished value. Referencing popular American journalistic jargon, the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall embodied a “no trespassing death–strip”[14] where constricting metal fences, alarms, armed guards, trip wires, search lights and automatic shooting devices illustrated the fatality of the wall. The sheer physicality of the death–strip as an abandoned but threatening no–mans land reinforced the seriousness of trying to escape and the extent East Germans were willing to go to keep hold of their population.
During the Cold War period various constructions of the Soviet Union existed in the Western academic sphere. One of the pervasive thought recreated the Soviets as an Asiatic and barbaric political power “which availed itself of the opportunity offered by World War II to intrude into Europe by military means.”[15] According to Churchill, Soviet presence in Europe threatened the global balance when, “a barbarian stood at the heart of Europe.”[16]The following year, Konrad Adenauer wrote William Sollmann saying, “Asia stands on the Elbe,”[17] implying that measures should be taken to halt any such threats to civilized Europe. Similarly, L’abbé Dominique-Géorges-Frédéric de Pradt exhorted Europeans to close ranks and gates against the Russians:
Russia is built up despotically and asiatically [...] Europe must draw closer together and as she shuts herself up, Europe should cooperate in outlawing all participation in her affairs by any power which does not have a direct interest in them and which has the force to weigh down the balance to suit her own interests.[18]
This Asiatic and barbaric construction of the Soviet Union transcended politics also dominating academic literature. De Reynold wrote, “Russia cannot be judged by Western measures and there exists a primordial geographical antithesis between Europe and Russia, where the former is sedentary and thus civilized, while the latter is nomadic and thus barbarian.”[19] The theme of the barbarian invading Europe is also noted by Milan Kundera’s phrase in Un Occidente Kidnapp é, where the West is occupied by Russians.[20]According to Kundera, Soviet occupation meant European civilization was under siege by Soviet barbarians.
The distinguishing trait of the so–called Barbarians was their political–economic system. This distinction created a hierarchy where the industrialized West became the First World, the Communist became the Second World and everyone else, the Third World. This stigma and hierarchical classification scheme of civilized, barbarian to savage was largely economically motivated and drew heavily on the symbol of the Great Wall of China.
The Great Wall of China was built by ‘cultured’ people to keep ‘barbarians’ at bay. In contrast, the Berlin Wall was built by ‘barbarians’ resisting ‘culture.’[21] According to the West, the Wall became a concrete symbol of an Eastern weakness and “its lack of faith in its own ability to withstand that attraction.”[22] This notion of the barbarian and the cultured mirrors the Communist politico–economic model equating it with Nazi totalitarianism. This dichotomy added to the notion of “binary opposites,”[23] where the civilized competed with the barbarian, the free against the oppressed, the East versus the West and the, defensive versus the offensive.
BERLIN
Constructing Division
Cities play very distinct roles in history– they constantly change to reflect the social, cultural, political and architectural relationships of their inhabitants. No other twentieth century city has experienced more change, tumult or controversy than Berlin. Berlin remains perhaps one of the most complex and politically charged urban areas in Europe.
In the 1930s, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer designed architectural plans for a New Berlin, a city to honor their leader, Adolph Hitler. The architects aimed to recreate a city, “more beautiful than Paris, more splendid than Vienna and more powerful than ancient Rome.”[24] Their dream of a New Berlin ceased to exist, as Berlin was reduced to dust after German defeat during the Second World War. In the place of beauty was destruction and devastation, and what was left of the prewar Berlin was divided into four sections by victors of the war.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis states the most striking anomaly of the Cold War was “the existence of a divided Europe, within which there resided a divided Germany, within which there lay a divided Berlin.”[25] The allied victory over Nazi Germany brought hope for peace in a united Europe. However, in Berlin, a collision point on the map between two systems, a fierce rivalry arose over the urban reconstruction and Berlin became the focus of ambitious rebuilding programs– by both the Soviets and the Allied Forces. The Federal Republic, backed by the United States, France and Britain aimed to turn West Berlin into a living example of Western superiority. They wanted democracy to rise out of the very heart of Hitler’s city, rebuilding Berlin into a state where freedom would be insured and the individual could elect whomever he chose to govern. In addition to creating a democratic governing body, West Berlin was to host a thriving capitalist economy. The East German government was equally determined to transform East Berlin, which it had always referred to as Berlin– Capital of the GDR into a showcase of Communist power and progression.[26] Backed by the Soviet Union, East Berlin aimed to further extend communist ideology into European cities by rebuilding Berlin as a Socialist Republic. This postwar reconstruction disagreement extinguished any and all notions of a peaceful future for Berlin and ultimately set the stage for the erection of the Berlin Wall.
The United States, Britain and France governed the Western section of Berlin while the Soviets ruled the East. Berlin, capital of the West’s “despised adversary”[27] became the focal point of the Cold War. There are myriad reasons Berlin symbolized this division: because the US government was at fault by not dictating peace in Berlin during WWI and therefore could have possibly prevented German aggression; because Berlin visually rendered the ideological conflict between political extremes; because of Soviet–claimed territories in Eastern Europe and Winston Churchill’s explanation of the Iron Curtain; or perhaps because of the glorified American memory of the United States’ credibility in Berlin after the 1948 Airlift. The 1948 Airlift in Berlin was the event that transformed American ideas about West Berliners from “beaten and despised foes into allies” during the ever–intensifying Cold War.[28]Regardless, no Cold War city other than Berlin “symbolized more vividly the unnatural division of Europe; no other kept the idea of one Germany and one Europe alive.”[29] Berlin was more than a city. Throughout history, Berlin has come to have a human character, embodying “a political culture with human qualities, both good and ill, somehow inherent in the character of Western Society. Paraphrasing John F. Kennedy, we are all Berliners.”[30]
Berlin’s importance to the United States was highly documented during the Cold War. A presentation given at the end of May by JFK to the Department of State stated, “the present importance of the city for our foreign policy can scarcely be exaggerated. Since 1948, we have, by our own choice, made Berlin the example and the symbol of our determination and our ability to defend the free parts of the world against Communist aggression.”[31] In response to Kennedy, Secretary of State, Dean Rusk furthering Berlin’s importance, stated, “West Berlin is a lighthouse of freedom in a dark totalitarian sea… It is a shining model of political, intellectual, and spiritual freedom in which individual liberties are assured and the people choose those who govern them.”[32] Before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War lacked any visual depiction, yet once the East German Government built the wall, American diplomats made The Berlin Wall’s significance quite clear.
THE WALL
The Berlin Wall and the American Administration
Basic Facts (at the time of July 31, 1989)
Total border length around West Berlin: 96 mi / 155 km
Border between East and West Berlin: 27 mi / 43.1 km
Border between West Berlin and East Germany: 69 mi / 111.9 km
Border through residential areas in Berlin: 23 mi / 37 km
Concrete segment wall: 3.6m (11.81 ft.) high, 66 mi / 106 km
Wire mesh fencing: 41 mi / 66.5 km
Anti-vehicle trenches: 65 mi / 105.5 km
Contact or signal fence: 79 mi / 127.5 kmColumn track: 6-7 m (7.33 yd) wide, 77 mi / 124.3 km
Number of watch towers: 302
Number of bunkers: 20Persons killed on the Berlin Wall: 192
Persons injured by shooting: ca. 200[33]
Die Grenze ist geschlossen
The border is closed.
On August 13 th, 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected, dividing East from West Berlin. Preceding 1961, the GDR had lost hundreds of thousands of its most talented citizens to the West. The exodus caused panic in the East, as it inferred a failure of the Socialist Utopia. Not only was the necessity of the Wall to keep East Berliners from fleeing a humiliating sign on the part of the Communist system, loosing so many workers to the West caused a huge labor shortage. Documented by East German officials, “bosses, collegues, friends were there one day and absent the next.”[34] Assembly lines were brought to a halt because the critical workers had left for the West in search of better opportunities. In an effort to halt migration, the border was sealed and a barricade was built intending to keep its citizens from escaping. According to Lapp, “the Berlin Wall was 13.6 meters tall, 11.6 km of the border around Berlin was walled. There were 124.9 km of electric fence, a 124– km road along the death strip for patrol cars and bikes, 258 dog runs, 298 watch towers and 52 bunkers.”[35] The wall had a visual strength and force bearing additional symbolism, as the sheer physical force of the wall implied the serious crime of leaving the republic. At Potsdamer Platz a sign was placed on the wall, “Wer die Staatsgrenze mit Gewalt einrenen will, wer an der Mauer provoiert, macht ales nur schlimmer!”– “Whoever threatens by force this authorized National Border, Whoever commits acts of provocation at the Wall, will only make matters worse!”[36] Though no one in the Kremlin liked the idea of building a wall to divide Berlin, East German officials were unable to stop the population movement into the Western Sector. After various laws, bans and restrictions failed, the Wall was built and the borders were sealed.
The Kennedy administration denounced the development of the Wall but did nothing to respond to its construction. At a fundraising dinner Kennedy publicly stated, “The fact of the matter is that in the last 12 months we have seen more clearly than ever before the contrast between our system and that of those who make themselves our adversaries. The wall in Berlin, to lock people in, I believe is the obvious manifestation, which can be demonstrated all over the world, of the superiority of our system.”[37] In private, however, Kennedy stated, “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”[38] Though Kennedy expressed moral uncertainty regarding the Wall, it served the pragmatic purpose of highlighting the superiorities and benefits of American freedom.
The construction of the wall provided stark commentary on the Cold War ideology and shifted American perspectives on Germany, the Soviet Union– and even themselves. Many Americans saw the wall as an effort on behalf of the Soviet Union to remove the most basic freedoms by restricting movement and communication with all other parts of the world. To Americans its “very construction was an admission of failure on the part of the East Germany’s communist system to provide for the basic necessities of life.”[39] This notion was perpetuated with stories about desperate escapes from the East. Americans appropriated the brutality of the Wall as a metaphor. The Wall showed the geographical dichotomy between freedom and repression. The Wall was called ‘Wall of Shame,’ and ‘Anti–fascist bulwark.’ This prompted the West to see West Berlin as a “beacon of liberty in the Red Sea” and, using the jargon favored by Western journalists during the Cold War, “the shop window of freedom.”[40] The depth of history and division in Berlin inspired writer Peter Hall to choose Berlin as his ideal city “for its extraordinary feeling of nostalgia for the Weimar years, the haunting memories of a hundred spy stories, and the promise of a new golden age, already erupting in the Spaunder Vorstadt.”[41]
The modern city treats boundaries between different places with subtlety in an attempt to neutralize the borders between its different spaces.[42]Before the erection of the Wall, this was true for the divided Berlin. As Dulles describes it, “Except for signs indicating that one was leaving the Western sectors, it was not obvious when one crossed over the line. On the subway and the elevated train, newcomers frequently entered the East sector without being aware that they were in a different jurisdiction.”[43] With the erection of the Wall, however, the boundary between East and West was anything but neutral. In fact, the Berlin Wall, modeled after the Chinese Wall, was intended not only to prevent GDR citizens from escaping to the West but also, like the Great Wall Of China, to prevent a free flow of “Western influence.”
EAST + WEST
Visual Differences Between Communist and Capitalist Ideologies
A highly differentiated architectural landscape in Berlin made American symbolic appropriation possible. The Cold War rivalry of the conflicting ideological systems extended to the realm of post–war urban reconstruction and architectural planning. Because the Federal Republic aimed to turn Berlin into an example of Western superiority and the East Germans were equally vested in showcasing their talents architecture became a competitive outlet. The Mercedez Benz building in the Western Sector aimed to out do the construction of the Television Tower in East Berlin.
In East Berlin the Soviets pushed a grand historicism that was supposed to reflect the heroic spirit of triumphant masses. As explained in a Russian planning document, in “structure and architectural form, the city is the expression of political life and the national consciousness of the people.”[44] The East German government attempted to match this ideal by constructing the Stalin Allee, an eighty–meter wide boulevard of massive and modern sevenstory buildings, running through Friedrichshain.[45] The Stalin Alle was designed by Hermann Henselmann to serve as a template for other grand streets in East Berlin. He aimed to transform East Berlin into a showcase of Communist progress and power, creating a notable and enviable landmark of East Berlin. Originally named Frankfurter Allee, it was renamed the Stalin Allee in 1949 after Joseph Stalin.
The first buildings on the boulevard were designed by Ludmilla Herzenstein and built between 1949 and 50. They were formalist and unadorned: five–story, cemented blocks inspired by the German modernist Bauhaus tradition of the 1920s. While The Stalin Allee was supposed to be a template for all other upcoming grand streets in East Berlin, it did not have a lasting influence. After Stalin’s death the GDR rejected the Bauhaus style in favor of a more progressive architectural approach, leaving the Stalin Allee a “white elephant” in the East Berlin landscape. This opened for a conscious return to national and local style, favoring Berlin neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. According to Ladd, East German buildings in 1951 incorporated “an amalgam of Schinkel and Stalin.”[46] In contrast to the earlier simple and boxy apartment style of the Bauhaus, the newer and larger buildings were generously proportioned and more richly ornamented with neoclassical details. The bases were clad with stone and elaborately pillared. The entrances of newer apartments were decorated with ceramic titles from Meißen. Newer buildings mirrored the hope for an emerging society in which ordinary workers would enjoy the comforts of the old bourgeoisie.[47] By doing away with the 1920s Bauhaus style in favor for a more contemporary Stalin–Baroque style, the GDR tried to showcase Communist power and convince fellow Berliners about the superiority of the Eastern block.
New Communist construction in the center of East Berlin was conspicuously absent prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall. They did, however, demolish the Eastern signature building, the Prussian Royal Palace. Ulbricht dreamed of building a giant skyscraper in its place, but instead the site was converted into a stage for mass rallies. In the late 60s to 70s, most of the prominent historical landmarks were replaced with buildings and monuments showcasing the new and forward–looking era. After the Royal Palace was in place in 1962, the GDR blew up Schinkel’s Bauakademie, which was previously one of Schinkel’s finest pieces of his oeuvre and replaced it with the GDR Foreign Ministry, an eleven–story white slab with abstract aluminum sculptures covering its façade.[48] The Television Tower, the GDR’s tallest structure, reaching 365 meters tall was built to out do West Berliner architectural monuments. The Television Tower, know to most as, ‘giant asparagus’ replaced the historic Alexanderplatz as GDR planners sought to erect monuments honoring socialist notions of functionalism.
Similarly, the postwar architecture in West Berlin sought to showcase Western superiority and ability– illustrating the benefits of Capitalist ideology. In the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial part of West Berlin’s cultural budget went into the construction of new buildings, according to urban planners, new and modern buildings symbolized and facilitated political transformation. The West wanted its architecture to convey the Federal Republic’s commitment to internationalism, egalitarianism, individualism and freedom. The West utilized the expressive International Style, which at the time was sweeping across postwar Western Europe and America and appeared politically progressive. The construction materials used to construct new buildings had to be politically correct: in place of the previously used stone or brick, Western architects used glass and steel. Thus, West Berlin was covered with ‘democratic’ glass boxes– which, according to city officials gave West Berlin a city center with trademark buildings, contemporary monuments and a very distinctive urban flair. In the ruins of the Gedächtniskirche, architect Egon Eiermann added a hexagonal tower honeycombed with dark glass in order to represent the common reconstruction attitude of “the new rising from the old.”[49]
In the 1960s, West Berlin lacked traces of WWII, as most of the aftermath of war had been cleared and most of the demolished buildings, rebuilt. In a portrait of Berlin at the time, the Western sector is described:
West Berlin, with a population of 2 million, the rubble of war had mostly been cleared away. Lights shone at night down the Kurfursten Damm, which was lined with smart shops and street cafes. Kempinski’s served famous ice–cream sundaes. One of the first Hilton hotels in Europe dominated the skyline. Theatres, concert halls, and nightclubs were packed. Many loved the busy, throbbing, cosmopolitan air of the city; others found it hectic, frantic.[50]
Because of the Western commitment to overpowering communism in Europe, the Western sector of Berlin had reaped benefits of the Western capitalist economy. In the Western popular imagination, East Berlin was depicted as a zone of diminished value. The drab grey of East Berlin’s surface area enticed few travelers A 1960s portrait of East Berlin shows societal effects of the opposing Cold War ideology:
Through the Brandenburg Gate, East Berlin was another world. The vast boulevard of the Unter den Linden, still elegant, was largely deserted. The huge Soviet Embassy stood on one side. Farther along, the destruction the war had brought was still visible. Buildings stood derelict, next to empty spaces where others had been destroyed. Posters everywhere proclaimed, “Build the Socialist Fatherland.” While everyone was fed and housed, the million people in East Berlin looked far from prosperous. In the drab new apartment blocks the services worked, but they were at a basic level. An East Berliner who could afford the luxury of a refrigerator would have to wait a year for one; for a washing machine, the wait was two years. Cars were not to be had on any waiting list. Consumer goods took no priority in an economy geared to earning necessary foreign currency through exports.[51]
Images and perceptions of East Berlin are similar to depictions of the Berlin Wall. In popular media The Berlin Wall and East Germany are both illustrated as desolate and abandoned spaces. The Eastern Sector of Berlin is depicted as a place to escape from.
THE FALLThe Berlin Wall & Consumerism
The architecture or lack of architecture created by The Berlin Wall, separating East from West Berlin symbolized many forms of ‘binary opposites.’ The Wall, dividing Berlin for 28 years, manifested differences between us and them, Communism and Capitalism, East and West and ‘in’ versus ‘out.’ As a ‘superimposed boundary,’ The Wall inspired both ‘imaginary’ and ‘real’ discourses. Yet, regardless of the symbolism the Wall acquired as it divided Berlin, fundamentally, The Berlin Wall was a border.
Borders divide space, clearly marking and excluding an ‘in’ from an ‘out.’ A border creates an interior space, which seeks homogeneity, for the purposed sake of differing from the exterior. Once boundaries are defined the intent is to defend them. Therefore, walls represent a larger power dynamic. According to Samson, “without the authority and power to make them function, walls cannot act as barriers, far less as serious fences; they are neutral without the social relations to makes them work.”[52]Samson continues, “the symbolic function of town walls is reflected by Gregory of Tours’ belief that their collapse was an unmistakable sign that the king would die.”[53] Erich Honecker a Soviet planner and architect is often called the King of East Berlin. When The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 so did King Erich. History overtook Erich Honecker and the coming decade demanded not the hero of the Wall’s construction but instead a hero of its deconstruction. The notion of a King of deconstruction according to Enzenberger “represents not victory, conquest and triumph, but renunciation and dismantling.”[54] The border between East and West Berlin opened on November 9 th, 1989. On November 10 th, two West German newspapers lying side by side read, ‘The Wall Has Fallen’ and ‘Bonn calls for the demolition of the Wall.’[55] In a journal from 1989 a West Berliner noted, “both were correct. The Wall was there and it no longer existed.”[56] The fall of The Wall reinforced the notion of imaginative geographies The Wall acquired as it stood. Noted by Gottfried Korff, after the fall of The Wall, Berlin became “a situation in which the past was negated, erased, cast aside, but the future hadn’t yet begun.”
The fall of The Wall marked the end of the Cold War and the victory of Capitalism over Communism– it also became the “eighth wonder of the world in the West.”[57] Symbolic elements of the fall of The Wall dominated Western media and were immediately appropriated into Western culture. More importantly the remains of the Berlin Wall were immediately available for sale. After 1989 images of The Berlin Wall materialized around the United States–as images of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of Communism were used as the backdrops for multiple advertising campaigns. In 1990 the Pepsi Corporation made a commercial about giving the gift of freedom. Images of happy citizens, cheering and laughing as they tore down the oppressive Wall that divided their city for almost three decades reached every American television set. After a recap of political events happening in Berlin a message crosses the television: ‘give the gift of freedom, drink Pepsi.’ Similarly, A T & T borrowed political documentary footage recorded as East and West Berliners tore down The Wall to sell telephones. A T & T promoted telephone sales and communication by addressing the oppressive restrictions put on communication by the Eastern Bloc.
Television played a very integral role in the events of 1989. Overwhelmingly, the images showed a triumphant joy as citizens destroyed the physical Wall with pick–axes and crowbars. The sheer pleasure of climbing onto the once death–trap and chipping away parts of the former Soviet prison overwhelmed American televisions.
Before the architecture of the Berlin Wall was completely eradicated from history, it became a tourist attraction. For 5 deutsche marks you could buy a piece of the Berlin Wall and for 20 deutsche marks you could rent a hammer or chisel and take pieces of The Wall for yourself. The consumer demand for fragments of the wall introduced a new profession to the German job market. Wall–peckers made enough money to support themselves by chipping authentic cuts from the Berlin Wall and selling them to tourists.
According to a Canadian Wall–pecker, owning pieces of the Wall was similar to owning history: “I knew everybody in the world was watching history happening here and that’s when I got the idea. I figured people would love to have a piece of that history, too. So I bought a hammer and chisel and started knocking off pieces of the Wall to sell back home.”[58] Even Reagan needed to take a piece. At a visit to the Wall, Reagan reported, “you have to touch The Wall to believe its reality” and you have to strike against The Wall to feel its destruction. [59]
The mass consumption of The Berlin Wall demanded mass production. When the supply of Wall fragments with genuine graffiti stopped the demand remained and the profit margins grew. After Wall–peckers chiseled all of the graffiti on the Western side of the Wall fragments were chipped from any section of the Wall and spray painted a matching color. Wall–peckers forged history. The small pieces of what was left of the Mauer, over which an estimated 200 East German citizens were killed while trying to escape to the West were being forged and sold as tourist attractions. The Berlin Wall was consumed by little purchases made at family souvenir stalls in our postmodern era when we seek to own history. Naturally owning history will always remain out of reach. Daniel Miller explains that the desire to personalize, to appropriate and finally to recontextualize objects is a prime motivation for consuming them.[60]
The sale of Berlin Wall fragments epitomized the com–modification of history. According to James Mayo, “when objects and events are separated from history, good or bad they express war history without explaining or justifying a war’s cause.”[61] This popular fascination and desire to own pieces of The Wall invokes problematic issues surrounding relics, where according to Young, by taking ownership of relics they loose all value: “suggest themselves as fragments of events, inviting us to mistake the debris of history for history itself.”[62] Regardless, pieces of the same Wall that divided families, crushed apartment buildings and caged its public in a prison–like environment for almost 30 years were available for purchase minutes after the fall of The Wall was announced and months before any unification planning began in Berlin.
President George Bush similarly used an exploitative appropriation of The Berlin Wall as he addressed the Republican Convention in Houston, Texas in August 1992. Within the framework of Bush’s presidential campaign, the stone provided concrete historical evidence that he, the President of the United States, was the leader of the free world. Consequently, his historical mission was to bring a ‘new world order’ to the new post Cold War world. Though Berlin Wall memorabilia flooded the free market and buying pieces of The Wall was quite easy, President Bush got his piece from Germany’s external affairs minister Hans–Dietrich Genscher. This exchange as observed by Lori Turner recreated pieces of The Wall, “into trophies reserved for the winners of the Cold War. They mark the victory of a political idea.”[63] The Cold War was ultimately a multi–faceted competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War marked these competitions, for more advanced arms, in the space race, for more powerful alliances, etc. Thus, it makes perfect sense that the ‘winner’ of the ideologically motivated Cold War would receive a trophy.
[1] Sartre, Jean–Paul. ‘American Cities,’ in The City: American Experience, eds. Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 207
[2] Sartre, Jean–Paul. ‘American Cities,’ in The City: American Experience, eds. Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 210
[3] Sartre, Jean–Paul. ‘American Cities,’ in The City: American Experience, eds. Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. 211
[4] Meiss, Pierre von. Elements of Architecture: From form to place. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 78
[5] Dean, Tacita. AT WORKS, Place. London: Thames & Hudson. 2005. 27
[6] Ronald Reagan as qtd. Wyden, Peter. Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin.New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. 123
[7] Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 54
[8] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[9] Clifford, James. Traveling Cultures , in Cultural Studies ed. Lawerence Grossberg, Carry Nelson and Paula Treichler. Routledge. London: 1992. 109
[10] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[11] Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 1991. 6
[12] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[13] Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 54
[14] Waldenberg, Hermann. The Berlin Wall Book. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. 120
[15] Charlton, Michael. The Eagle and the Small Birds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984.
[16] Charlton, Michael. The Eagle and the Small Birds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1984.
[17] Adenauer, Konrad Briefe, 1945-1947. Edited by Hans Peter Mensing. Berlin: 1983.
[18] Cadot, Michel. “L’image de la Russie dans la vie intellectuelle française.” Paris: Fayard. 1839/56 (1967)
[19] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[20] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[21] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[22] Neumann, Iver B. “Russia as Central Europe’s Constituting Other. East European Politics and Society” 7(2),
[23] Stein, Mary Bah. Berlin /Berlin: The Wall in the Expressive Culture of a Divided City, (Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1993)
[24] Craig, Gordon A. “Berlin, the Hauptstadt: Back where it belongs.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/ August, (1998). 166
[25] Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 115
[26] Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 115
[27] May, Ernest R. “America’s Berlin: Heart of the Cold War.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/August, (1998). 148
[28] Craig, Gordon A. “Berlin, the Hauptstadt: Back where it belongs.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/ August, (1998). 166
[29] Bertram, Christoph. “Germany Moves On: Laying Angst to Rest.” Foreign Affairs 77. July/August, (1998). 186
[30] Presidental Address in Berlin, June 23, 1963. POF, JFKL, Box 45.
[31] The United States Position on Berlin, May 29, 1961. National Security Files, John F. Kennedy, JFKL, 81.1
[32] “Berlin–1961: A Pamphlet setting forth some of the basic facts about Berlin, the repeated assaults on its freedom and out obligations” Dean Rusk, August 18, (1961), 28, POF, JFKL, 116a
[33] The Wall, Press and Information Office of Land Berlin 2000/2001
[34] Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 74
[35] Lapp, P.J. Frontdienst im Frieden: Die Greztruppen der DDR. Koblenz: Bernard & Graefe. 1987
[36] Balfour, Alan. Berlin, The Politics of Order 1737– 1989. Rizzoli International. New York: 1990. 194
[37] John F. Kennedy, vol. 1962, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Washington D.C.: United States Printing Office, 1963. 77
[38] Gelb, Norman. The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushev , and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe. New York: Dorset Press, 1990.
[39] Gelb, Norman. The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushev , and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe. New York: Dorset Press, 1990.
[40] Church, George. “Freedom! The Wall crumbles overnight, Berliners embrace in joy, and a stunned world ponders the consequences.” TIME MAGAZINE 20, November 1989.
[41] Hall, Peter. “Ideal Cities: Thirteen Writers Describe the City that Comes Closest to Perfection.”18 September, 1992. 30
[42] Sennett, Richard. “The Body and the City. Looking for Live Space in the Modern Townscape,” TLS, September, 1992. 3-4
[43] Wilson, Elizabeth. Architecture and Consciousness. Berkeley: University of California Press, Berkeley 1991. 98
[44] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[45] Neue Architektur. Ed. Deutsches Architektur Centrum. (1990-2000). Berlin: jovis, 2000.
[46] Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997. 183
[47] Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997. 183
[48] Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997 Last Chapter.
[49] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[50] Klaus, Larres. International Affairs Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 2001) Royal Institute of International Affairs (1944), 1002-1003
[51] Klaus, Larres. International Affairs Vol. 77, No. 4 (Oct., 2001) Royal Institute of International Affairs (1944), 1002-1003
[52] Sampson, R. Knowledge, Power and Constraint in Inaction: the defenseless medieval wall. 1992, 41
[53] Sampson, R. Knowledge, Power and Constraint in Inaction: the defenseless medieval wall. 1992, 42
[54] Enzenberger, H. M. The State of Europe, in 1989. 137
[55] Darnton, R. Der letzte Tanz auf der Mauer: Berliner Journal 1989–1990.Munchen. 1991
[56] Darnton, R. Der letzte Tanz auf der Mauer: Berliner Journal 1989–1990. Munchen. 1991
[57] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[58] Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.
[59] Qtd. Ragean. “Freedom! The Wall crumbles overnight, Berliners embrace in joy, and a stunned world ponders the consequences.” TIME MAGAZINE 20, November 1989.
[60] Miller, Daniel. Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Basil. 1987
[61] James M. Mayo, War Memorials as Political Landscapes: The American Experience and Beyond New York: Praeger, 1988, 6
[62] James Young, “The Veneration of Ruins,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 6(1993):278.(41.)
[63] Turner, Lori. “The Berlin Wall: Fragment as Commodity,” Border/Lines 19(1990):3
