Academic literature on the topic 'Berlin Wall (Berlin, Germany : 1961-1989) in literature'

Berlin was the location in which most of the intelligence operations in Europe have taken place in the first twenty years of the conquest and the Cold War. In November 27, 1958, Khrushchev issued a formal letter to the Allies, demanding that the western Allies evacuate Berlin and enable the establishment of an independent political unit, a free city. He threatened that if the West would not comply with this, the soviets would hand over to the East Germany’s government the control over the roads to Berlin. In the coming months Moscow conducted a war of nerves as the last date of the end of the ultimatum, May 27, 1959, came close. Finally the Soviets retreated as a result of the determination of the West. This event reconfirmed the claims of the West that “the US, Britain and France have legal rights to stay in Berlin.” According to Halle: “These rights derive from the fact that Germany surrendered as a result of our common struggle against Nazi Germany.” (Note 2) The Russians have done many attempts to change Berlin’s status. In 1961 Berlin Wall was constructed, almost without response on the part of the West, and by so doing, the Soviets perpetuated the status quo that had been since 1948. In July 25, 1961 Kennedy addressed the Americans on television, saying that “West Berlin is not as it had ever been, the location of the biggest test of the courage and the will power of the West.” (Note 3) On June 26, 1963, Kennedy went out to Berlin, which was divided by the wall, torn between east and west, in order to announce his message. In his speech outside the city council of West Berlin, Kennedy won the hearts of the Berliners as well as those of the world when he said: “Ich bin ein Berliner”, I’m a Berliner. The sixties were years of heating of the conflict with the Soviet Block. In 1961 the Berlin Wall was constructed. Then Kennedy came into power, there was the movement for human rights and the political tension between whites and blacks in America. The conflict increase as the Korean War started, and afterwards when America intervened in Vietnam. There was also the crisis in the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, which almost pushed the whole world into a nuclear war and catastrophe. During the 28 years of the Berlin Wall, 13.8.61-9.11.89, this was notorious as an example of a political border that marked the seclusion and freezing more than freedom of movement, communication and change. At the same time there was the most obvious sign of the division of Germany after WWII and the division of Europe to East and West by the Iron Curtain. The wall was the background of stories by writers from east and west. The writers of espionage thrillers were fascinated by the global conflict between east and west and the Cold War with Berlin as the setting of the divided city. Berlin presented a permanent conflict that was perceived as endless, or as Mews defined it: “Berlin is perfect, a romantic past, tragic present, secluded in the heart of East Germany.” (Note 4) The city presented the writers with a situation that demanded a reassessment of the genres and the ideological and aesthetic perceptions of this type of writing. This was the reason that the genre of espionage books blossomed in the sixties, mainly those with the wall. The wall was not just a symbol of a political failure, as East Germany could not stop the flow of people escaping from it. The city was ugly, dirty, and full of wires and lit by a yellow light, like a concentration camp. A West German policeman says: “If the Allies were not here, there would not have been a wall. He expressed the acknowledgment that the Western powers had also an interest in the wall as a tool for preventing the unification of Germany. But his colleague answers: If they were not here, the wall would not have been, but the same applies for Berlin. (Note 5) Berlin was the world capital of the Cold War. The wall threatened and created risks and was known as one of the big justifications for the mentality of the Cold War. The construction of the wall in August 1961 strengthened Berlin’s status as the frontline of the Cold War and as a political microcosmos, which reflected topographical as well as the ideological global struggle between east and west. It made Berlin a focus of interest, and this focus in turn caused an incentive for the espionage literature with the rise of neorealism with the anti-hero, as it also ended the era of romanticism. (Note 6) The works of le Carré and Deighton are the best examples of this change in literature. Both of them use the wall as the arena of events and a symbol in their works. Only at the end of the fifties, upon the final withdrawal of McCarthyism and the relative weakening of the Cold War, there started have to appear films with new images about the position and nature of the Germans and the representations of Nazism in the new history. The films of the Cold War presented the communists as enemies or saboteurs. Together with this view about the Soviets, developed the rehabilitation of the German image. Each part of the German society was rehabilitated and become a victim instead of an assistant of the Nazis. The critic Dwight MacDonald was impressed by the way in which the German population” has changed from a fearful assistant of one totalitarian regime to the hero opponent of another totalitarian regime”. (Note 7) This approach has to be examined, and how it influenced the development of the German representation, since many films I have investigated demonstrate a different approach of the German representation.

West German literature has turned its back to the existence of the second German state until the 1980s. Only a few years before the fall of the Berlin wall, three writers started to make the GDR a subject of narration or poetry: Botho Strauß, Peter Schneider and Martin Walser. In different ways, yet unanimously, they complain about the division of Germany dealing with its impact on everyday life and private feelings.

Abstract Shakespeare’s Fortinbras has just two brief appearances and fewer than thirty lines to speak. But notwithstanding his physical absence during most of the play, he exerts considerable sway, representing the political world beyond Elsinore and the antithesis to Hamlet. As such he plays a major role in the political afterlife of the play. The article traces the metamorphoses Fortinbras undergoes in his afterlife in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century through the First and Second World Wars to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the concept of “normalcy” has occupied a prominent place in the pronouncements of Germany's most powerful politicians and policy makers. In addition, it has also suffused much of the emerging literature on the domestic and international implications of German unification. Some observers argue that unification embodies the call to normalcy, offering Germany's leaders the opportunity to put their nation's past behind them. Others treat the events of 1989–90 as part of an ongoing challenge to German identity. Finally, a third group of scholars regards the invocation of German unity as an excuse for papering over the crimes of the Nazi past. Although there is no a priori basis for considering any one of these approaches the most appropriate for assessing contemporary German affairs, this does not mean one's choice of terms is totally arbitrary. If German normalcy is to mean anything analytically, it must minimally represent an attainable and worthy goal to which the leaders of the Federal Republic can aspire in their efforts to make Germany more like other European states.

The Berlin Wall is – in spite of its obvious function and its supposedly simple form (Gestalt) – an object that must be read carefully. Countless attempts have been made to analyze the significance of the Berlin Wall. The present analysis does not make use of statistics, mass media representations, or historical moralities in its attempt to arrive at a new understanding of the Wall. Instead, the focus is on the Wall as a complex architectural form and its function for a second German national literature after 1961.

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."

This article examines how the German radical-right populist party the Alternative for Germany ( Alternative für Deutschland) and its politicians have engaged with the public memory of the East German past via Twitter and how this has impacted the use of social media as a tool of political commemoration in Germany. The article analyses the mnemonic wars over ‘anniversary tweets’ related to four events: the East German Uprising (1953); the construction (1961) and fall (1989) of the Berlin Wall; and German reunification (1990). The article surveys when and how Twitter became a platform for these events’ political commemoration and the role of the Alternative für Deutschland therein. It also outlines the mnemonic discourses that the Alternative für Deutschland has deployed on Twitter around these events’ anniversaries and explores the sorts of digital contestation and transnationalization evident at these times.

In her book that explores Turkish migrant organizations in Germany, sociologist Gökçe Yurdakul detects a historical transformation in the political representation of migrants and minorities from the 1970s through the 2000s. She marks six historical events that lead to this transformation: labor migration (1961–1972), the introduction of family reunification law (1973–1979), post-1980 military coup asylum seekers from Turkey (1980–1988), the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath of exacerbating xenophobia against non-German minorities (1989–1998), the introduction of the new citizenship law (1999), and finally the terrorist attacks on September 11 (2001–present). According to Yurdakul, these events mark a gradual shift in the minority rights debate. While the first minority organizations were formed around labor rights, gradually, due to these landmark events and laws, their demands shifted toward political and social rights of citizenship, and identitarian rights, such as the right “to exist as Muslims and as Europeans.”

AbstractDrawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ‘body not at home’ on the one hand and on the concept of the disturbing ‘foreign body’ (Fremdkörper) as deployed in various trauma studies on the other, this article explores how the traumatized body is to be understood as a disoriented and unstable body. Trauma, however, is not only something that leaves one restless. It also connects one with the trauma of another and leads to mutual understanding. Having been affected by the wound of another, a certain kind of communication among the wounded emerges, which makes traumatic memory accessible. How such an affective impact may look can be shown by examining Lutz Seiler’s award-winning novel Kruso (2014). Set on the isle of Hiddensee shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Seiler tells the story of two men, Kruso and Ed, both traumatized by the loss of a loved one. As both are East German castaways and equally affected by their loss, they develop an intimate relationship, one not void of suppressed desire, mistrust, and aggression. Only years after Kruso’s death is Ed able to come to terms with the past and find a place for burying the vanished dead.

In this article, the authors refer to the play “Kein Schiff wird kommen” (“No ship will come”), 2010, by a young German playwright Nisa-Momme Stockmann, in which “historical events are refracted in the context of personal events of the characters”. In the center of the play is a young man, a writer, who was commissioned by the theater to write about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The protagonist of the play is a representative of an indifferent generation, far from politics and history. In 1989, he himself was a child, and the reunification of Germany, at first glance, had no effect on him. However, upon closer inspection, it turns out that the fall of the wall turned out to be an important event for him and his family. Only an appeal to the history of the country and the family helps the character to resolve the internal conflict. This shows the relationship with the tradition of German literature after World War II: German writers often refer to historical facts in their works. The key topic is of guilt and responsibility, which has been rethought in the literature over the past 60 years. Analysing the drama allows us to conclude that modern young people reject their past, which causes the character's personality crisis, and it also leads to failure in communication. In addition, alongside with ousting the past, the problem of German identity arises.

The art on the Berlin Wall has been looked at often for its social and political meaning. Instead, I intend to look at the artwork and text which appeared on the Berlin Wall as art. In this paper I will discuss the formal aspects of the art on the Berlin Wall as well as its import as an example of public art and as a forum created through visual representation.

Berlin, de 1961 à 1989, est une ville divisée, partagée par un mur de béton séparant l'Est, capitale de la République démocratique allemande, de l'Ouest, îlot isolé de la République fédérale d'Allemagne. Front de la Guerre froide, les caméras s'en sont emparées. Filmer Berlin, ce n’était pas seulement montrer un territoire urbain précis et délimité, c'était porter à l’écran un espace régi par un contexte historique, social et politique extrêmement prégnant traduisant de fortes spécificités. Deux systèmes de représentation de l’espace urbain ont coexisté dès 1945 nourris d’éléments propres à chaque partie de la ville et de formes esthétiques spécifiques. À partir du 13 août 1961, date de la construction du Mur, la réalité de la division de la ville s'acte dans le béton. Le cinéma s'en est fait le témoin. Ces images, celles de Soi, celles de l’Autre peuvent être envisagées comme des produits de deux sociétés avec leurs symbolismes propres, leurs codes socioculturels et leurs histoires parallèles. Elles sont à ce titre révélatrices de la manière dont a été montré Berlin. Ces deux imageries participent à la construction d’une identité urbaine plurielle, tendant parfois à revêtir un caractère protéiforme dont il importe de questionner les aspects. C’est aux expressions filmées de cette altérité, de cet espace urbain singulier, que cette thèse d'études cinématographiques s'attache. Au carrefour de plusieurs observatoires disciplinaires et avec une démarche géo-centrée, elle propose un essai de topographie cinématographique<br>From 1961 to 1989, Berlin is a divided city, split by a concrete wall separating the eastern part, capital city of the German Democratic Republic, from the western one, isolated island of the German Federal Republic. Frontline of the Cold War, the cameras captured it.Filming Berlin was not only depicting a precise and bound urban territory, it was bringing to the screen a space ruled by a very significant historical, social and political context conveying strong specificities. Two systems of representation of the urban space coexisted as soon as 1945, fueled by each side of town’s own elements and specific aesthetic forms. From August 13th 1961, the day the Wall was built, the reality of the division of the city is made concrete-solid. Cinema was made the witness of this reality. These pictures, of the Self, of the Other, can be considered as products of both societies, with their own symbolisms, their sociocultural codes and parallel histories. As such, they are indicative of the way Berlin has been shown.Both imageries take part in the construction of a plural urban identity, that sometimes tends towards a shape-shifting hallmark, whose aspects it seems important to question. This PhD in cinematic studies endeavours to describe, analyse and interpret the filmed expressions of this alterity, this singular urban space. At the crossroad of several disciplinary fields and in a geo-centered approach, it offers an essay on cinematic topography

La presente tesis doctoral se ocupa de revisar y analizar de forma ensayística y por hitos históricos desde los estudios culturales, postcoloniales y la historia del arte casos de proyectos de artistas latinoamericanos en el Berlín post-Caída del Muro y hasta el desmontaje del Palast der Republik, identificando a ambos hitos como cruciales en una etapa de transformación de la ciudad tras el fin de la Guerra Fría. El abordaje se inscribe en el giro espacial – tanto epistemológico como de prácticas artísticas – y entendiendo a las prácticas desde el arte como sociales y por ende generadoras y transformadoras de espacios y experiencias de vida en la ciudad. Esto es logrado a partir de estrategias desde una identidad y diferencia para llegar a la contemporaneidad como eje y lograr así espacios liminales y zonas de contacto para la negociación de conflictos, narrativas y discursos del pasado y presente, así como de tiempos-espacios diferentes en el contexto global.<br>This doctoral thesis is an approach from a perspective from the cultural, postcolonial studies and art history, reviewing and analyzing historical milestones and projects of Latin American artists in the Berlin post-Fall of the Wall until the dismantling of the Palast der Republik. It considers both historical moments as crucial in a stage of transformation of the city after the end of the Cold War. The approach is framed in the spatial turn – considering both epistemological and practical dimensions of it - and understanding art practices as social, and therefore generating and transforming spaces and life experiences in the city. This is achieved from strategies from identity and difference, arriving at the contemporaneity as an axis. The projects analyzed produce liminal spaces and contact zones for the negotiation of conflicts, narratives, and discourses of the past and present, as well as of different time-spaces in the global context.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 1998.<br>eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-373).

Abstract This chapter considers the important relations of both German states with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War years. Once victory over Nazi Germany had been achieved, Stalin wanted to ensure that it would be impossible for Germany to launch yet another war against the Soviet Union. One means of weakening Germany were large territorial cessions. Another way was to turn Germany into a communist country. But it became clear that communism could be implemented only with the help of the Soviet Army. This chapter traces the conflicts among the great powers regarding Germany which led to the Cold War and the division of Germany. The Soviet occupation zone was soon turned into the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which became a cornerstone of the Soviet Empire. The suppression of the popular East German uprising in 1953 revealed that Stalin’s successors would continue to insist on upholding Soviet interests in Germany with all their might. Only the construction of a wall and the complete sealing off of West Berlin could stop the enormous population drain from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). In 1961, the status quo was thus cemented in the truest sense of the word; yet legally, the German question remained open throughout the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform policy laid the foundation for the changes in Eastern Europe in 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chancellor Kohl decisively pushed the reunification process—yet, against the will of most European governments.