Recently, 25 years after Gorbachev, Reagan, John Paul II, Harald Jaeger, or, alternatively, David Hasselhoff, brought down the Berlin Wall, Germans flocked to the capital and the East Side Gallery to mark the occasion. Many news outlets and blogs have discussed the festivities, culminating with the symbolic release of glowing balloons shortly after midnight on Monday morning of November 10th, but few have acknowledged the paradoxes and inequalities that persist. While attending the Berlin Border Seminar, organized by Martin Barthel (Comparative Research Network), I witnessed some of the ways these dissonances seep through narratives of progress, pan-Europeanism, and tourist-friendly order. I also had the pleasure to hear about border-related research happening in Europe, including James W. Scott‘s thoughts on the dynamic, ongoing process of bordering and re-bordering in urban spaces in cities such as Berlin. (Here are links to the conference schedule: Berlin Border Seminar Booklet 41114 and BBS Errata.)
As I made my way to the Armony hotel on the morning of Saturday, the 8th of November, I walked along the former line of the western wall (it was actually a strip, not a single wall). While it would have been a lofty task to damage all or most of the thousands of balloons, its clear that a significant number had been destroyed. Some of the thin, black posts were knocked over or bent, and other balloons were simply popped, leaving their stands holding limp blobs off lifeless latex. More importantly, some of the remaining balloons had been repurposed to display radical messages. (See photos below.) One, for instance, had two boxes, beside “Berlin wall” and “European Wall,” with the first selected with an approving “X.” Tellingly, most of the balloons had been repaired or replaced by the following morning. Continue reading
Borderlands History 