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The German Democratic Republic (GDR) treated the Berlin Wall as an official state border, but the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did not recognize it as an official state border and thus did not impose entry controls. This asymmetric recognition opened up a gap in the regime of border policing and turned divided Berlin into one of the most significant sources of unauthorized migration into the FRG, creating tensions in Berlin, West Germany, and western Europe more broadly. Countries including France, Denmark, and the Netherlands all pressured the FRG to shut the open border in Berlin. This article examines how West German authorities sought to respond to their demands without recognizing the Berlin Wall as a state border. West German authorities pursued two broad strategies. The first involved internalizing the border through institutionalized racial profiling in West Berlin. The second entailed externalizing the border by asking the GDR to enforce FRG visa and passport requirements. Although both forms of border policing have often been associated with the end of the Cold War, this article shows that they were adopted earlier, and in response to Cold War imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early years after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a number of smuggling operations from behind the Wall were executed, and the reports of them spread through the Western media. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the popular Swedish men's magazines Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt published several exclusive photo reportages about such operations, providing Swedish readers with information about the East Germans' desire to escape their country, and the West Germans' willingness to assist. This article discusses the Swedish escape reports as examples of border crossing through their form as well as their content. It is analysed, how the escape reports published in Sweden both represented and generated border-crossing activity. The smuggling stories also illustrate the entangled character of popular print media: the travels of texts and pictures beyond national, cultural and lingual borders as well as travels between apposite publications. The material of the article consists of a total of ten reportages published in Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt between 1965–1966 and 1973. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the mass media is an important tool that audiences rely on to learn about the past, the relationship among journalism, history, and memory is still underdeveloped; visual collective memory, like visual studies in other subfields, has received even less attention than written and textual representations of collective memory. To address that gap, this article uses a qualitative content analysis to assess how 15 newspapers commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s opening through photographs. Newspapers from countries that were capitalist and communist in 1989 are compared to identify the ways that different cultures ‘remember’ the same past. Five genres of images emerged: iconic photographs, memorials, metonymic and mythological portraits, metonymic relics, and images of resistance, though these genres were framed differently depending on a country’s political system in 1989. In comparing this cross-cultural collective memory, this study looks at what these visual commemorations reveal about cross-cultural anniversary practices, an area of memory studies that has received little attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two comics works – Art Spiegelman’sMausand Flix’sDa war Mal was– and their employment of the comics form in portraying the horror behind cultural separationalism at the heart of two of the most extreme separational regimes in history: the Nazi regime and the GDR. This is demonstrated through a focus on scenes depicting attempts to defy imposed separation mainly through what is defined, following the Fanonean term, as different acts of ‘passing’. The juxtaposition of these works through this prism shows that while both differ from the medium’s comical genesisandfrom the sex-drugs-violence satirical approach of underground comix, they nevertheless remain loyal to the comics traditions in their depiction of the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall era. Hence, they explore separationalism at its extreme through a literary form that defies the fundamental dichotomy between the textual and the visual. By doing so they allow a discussion that examines the human experience under any separating ideological system thus echoing Arendt’s historical approach, termed here as a ‘counter-oblivion’ approach, applied in her study of totalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the New York Times and the Washington Post have in the past two decades presented discourses of anniversary journalism to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Berlin Wall, both of which occurred in 1989 and had global implications. These two events ideologically signified the failure of Communism and the victory of the West. However, they posed different challenges to the U.S.-orchestrated “new world order.” Insofar as the Tiananmen crackdown was remembered as an “unfinished revolution” and fell within the “sphere of legitimated controversy,” the elite U.S. press had greater leeway in presenting the views of elite factions, albeit all within the orbit of “established pluralism.” In contrast, since European integration after the fall of the Berlin Wall was an issue of broad elite consensus, the press constructed its perspectives more closely aligned with those of official foreign policy. Anniversary journalism connects personal reminiscences of distinguished journalists to the dominant narratives. The ideological structure of the elite U.S. press has been highly stable, even though the narratives may appear to shift periodically. The legacy of the anti-Communist frame remains an important constituent of the elite U.S. press’s prisms for viewing and interpreting the post-Communist world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focusing on the case of Berlin, this article explores the function of memory landscapes using the concept of the labor of the negative. Through three Berlin cases-the memorialization of the Berlin Wall, recent counter-memorials to the Holocaust, and the urban appropriation of voids through temporary projects-the article suggests that the labor of the negative constitutes Berlin's memory landscape out of the interplay between absence and presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article chronicles several visits to Germany's most prominent Holocaust monuments: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, both located in Berlin. Juxtaposing memories with observation, the author argues that in the German national imaginary Eisenman's and Libeskind's architecture of abstraction offers a space for ‘wall love’: a certain German nostalgia for the innocence of a history that never was; a longing for the return of the Berlin Wall, that safeguard of German post-war identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Berlin Wall was a key site of contestation between the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic in their Cold War struggle over political legitimacy. On both sides, the Wall became a tool in intense publicity battles aimed at building legitimacy and collective identity at home, and undermining them in the other Germany. The public perceptions and politicized uses of the barrier evolved through stages that reflected the relative fortunes of the two German states, moving gradually from extensive East-West parallels in the early 1960s toward a growing divergence by the 1970s and 1980s, which became increasingly indicative of East Germany's weakness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 had repercussions not only on the international scene, but also for the power relationship between state and society in the German Democratic Republic. This article considers the short-, medium- and long-term reactions of the East German population to the border closure from a personal and political perspective, examining key groups such as educated elites, workers, and young people. The closed society elicited a new deference in the short term, but the author argues for considerable continuities of low-level disruptive behavior before and after 13 August. In the longer term, there was a generation born behind the Wall which by simple habituation rather than a conscious decision was forced to accept the new contours of the geopolitical landscape created by the Wall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Berlin Wall was built three times: in 1961, in the mid 1960s, and again from the mid 1970s onwards. This article attempts to interpret each manifestation as political architecture providing insights into the mindset and intentions of those who built it. Each phase of the Wall had a different rationale, beyond the straightforward purpose of stopping the citizens of East Germany from leaving their own country and forcing them to suffer under communist rule. The deliberately brutal-looking first Wall was a propaganda construct not originally intended to exist for more than a few months. The functional but dreary Wall of the mid 60s was calculated to have a longer lifespan, but within few years it, too, became an embarrassment for the East German rulers. Yearning for international recognition, they demanded a smoother-looking, better designed Wall-supporting their fiction that this was "a national border like any other." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The border guards were what made the Berlin Wall both function and lethal. Without them, people could escape nearly without any hindrance. Thus, it is crucial to understand the role of the border guards, who they were, and how they were prepared for their duty. They had a double task: preventing citizens, in most cases respectable and unarmed, from fleeing; and serving as an initial front-line defense in case of war. The military aspect of their mission, however, remained hypothetical, whereas preventing escapes became their daily duty. The duplicity of their task, with the military aspect determining armament, training, and structure no doubt increased the number of fatalities at the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initially after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and its state-sponsored demolition over the following year, only a handful of sites remained with pieces of the Berlin Wall still standing. These were magnets for foreign tourists, but Germans themselves, including German officials, were far more interested in creating a united future than in preserving parts of the divided past. With the passage of time, however, the Germans have increasingly come to believe in the importance of explaining the history of the Wall, commemorating its victims, and preserving its few authentic remains in Berlin. This article examines several key moments and debates in the process of the Germans coming-to-terms with the history of the Wall. It charts the process whereby the public and political leaders have devoted greater attention to the Wall in recent years, particularly on the occasions of the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of the fall of the Wall in 2004 and 2009 and the fiftieth anniversary of the erection of the Wall in 2011. Finally, the article analyzes lessons German politicians are drawing from the history of the Berlin Wall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifty years after the construction of the Berlin Wall (13 August 1961), and twenty-one years after its removal in 1989, historians are still examining the Wall's deadly history and its complicated legacy. The Berlin Wall stopped time: it put off a reexamination of Berlin's Nazi and post-war history for decades. This essay examines some of the challenges Berliners have faced while overcoming the division of Berlin since the fall of the Wall in November 1989. Berlin's reunification could not be properly accomplished until the sites and structures associated with the Nazi and Communist regimes that had been headquartered at Berlin had been properly exorcised. Even if the eventual reunification of the two Germanys had not occurred, and the German government not voted to move the new government to Berlin in 2000, Berlin's World War Two legacy would have been reawakened anyway by the simple removal of the barrier: by crossing the border. Therefore, this essay explores another chapter in Berlin's "vergangenheitsbewältigung", its "mastery of its past". This essay argues that, rather than waking up from history, Berliners woke up to history in 1989. Once the Wall disappeared and attempts began to physically reunite the city, Berlin's past immediately sprang up in the sites being renovated. They had to be addressed to properly reunite the two halves of Berlin since most of these sites occupied the very center of the city. This reckoning with the past would have had to occur whether or not the government moved back to Berlin. The Berlin Wall simply put off the day of reckoning experienced by most other German cities since 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what way does national history shape the interpretation of international events in that country's media? Germany has always had a particularly sensitive and complex relationship with Israel. The Holocaust left such a scar on German identity that the country cannot consider Israel without confronting its own history. In Israel, Germany sees a 'reflection' of its own historical and symbolic space. In this article, I draw together a close reading of major German newspapers with more interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives in order to illuminate the mechanism of what I call 'mirror reading,' and especially to reveal its workings during what I consider a key shift in the discourse on German identity. The German print media, which I treat as the activating agent in German narration of national identity, plays a central role in this reflection by projecting national symbols onto Israel. In particular, I identify the initial reception of the Israeli wall (2003-2004) as a turning point in the debate on German self-understanding after the Holocaust. I establish that there are two extremes in a continuum of how German national history can frame the Israeli wall, one making Germany an active agent and the other a passive one. Employing national symbols in the media distorts the domestic perception of foreign events. My study casts a first light on this little understood-but nonetheless crucial-phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the East-Central European cities had to re-invent themselves to quickly adapt to a globalising world. Urban identity production policies were usually geared to connect to a chosen pre-socialist “Golden Age”, ignoring the socialist past as a simple disturbance of a “normal” development path. This story the cities were to tell, however, frequently conflicted with the socio-economic realities of a rather unsmooth transformation process, making the socialist past part of the urban identity. In the case of Berlin, a post-socialist and at the same time a post-western-stronghold city, urban identity production is bound to be more complicated than anywhere else. After the failure of the policy to “critically reconstruct” the cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1920s and thus erasing the past of the divided city, policies developed in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall aim at turning the Cold War past into a central element of the story that is to support its urban identity, notably leading to the comprehensive re-emergence of the Berlin Wall in the cityscape. This policy – unmatched in other East-Central European cities – has its origins in a historic struggle for identity, leading to the questionable attempt to make “change” the main story Berlin is to tell. This theme however – in conjunction with the reconstructed Wall as image brand – may fall short of creating an urban identity accepted by large population parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on extensive field research that the author has conducted in eastern Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this essay discusses the history of communist education in East Germany and its relevance for Western education today. Among the topics addressed are the differences between “propaganda” and “enlightenment” according to communist ideology, the structure of the East German system of education and extracurriculars, how that system fostered “textbook Reds,” and how its curricular materials portrayed the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community employment policies have been developed throughout the construction process of the European Union. Since the Lisbon Strategy, Europe's economic approaches have gradually been strengthened, making it the most competitive and dynamic economy in the world. However, its criteria seeks to cut some social security benefits and endanger workers' rights. The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, largely as a result of the violation of human and social rights, is a source of reflection and collaboration among European States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today Berlin's most famous symbol—the Berlin Wall—is almost absent from the city, lost amidst a cityscape striving for 'normality'. However, this construct—representing not only the conflict of the Cold War, but also its curious stability—continues to provoke controversy, primarily in its role as an 'unintended' monument. This article examines the complex patterns of remembrance relating to the Wall and the GDR border which have emerged in Berlin since unification. Through two case studies of contrasting public memory projects—the Ubergange competition (1996-1999) and the Freiheitsmahnmal (2004-2005)—it asks how far memory, and thus identity, can be concretised in physical form and whether monuments can provoke the active experience of memory, thus recognising the fluidity and temporality of identity. The case studies demonstrate not only the highly constructed nature of collective identities, but also the benefits of a varied and decentralised memorial landscape, particularly in light of the large number and variety of interest groups, shifting political agendas, the demands of the tourist industry and frictions between East and West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

a new world was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It meant the end of the XXth century, of the geography based on the division of the planet in three different worlds, and of the soviet monolithic model. After that the processes of establishment of economic blocs were expanded. A new center of gravity of capitalist system began to be considered as the evidence of a new hegemonic cycle (an Asian one, led by China). But dilemmas and risks are not smaller if compared to the past which can be deduced by the fall of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, in 2001, the proliferation of terrorist networks, the latent nuclear threat, and systemic economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]