The Berlin Wall - a material and psychic history

Parte, Christina Maria Margarethe (2024) The Berlin Wall - a material and psychic history. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis concentrates on the material and psychic history of the Berlin Wall (1961-1989) and is based on the analysis of images. A visual history of the Berlin Wall acknowledges the fact that the Wall as material object before and after its demolition has been predominantly sensed and made sense of in form of images; whether photographic, filmic, digital or in form visual metaphors such as the Iron Curtain or the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall. While a haptic engagement with the Wall was possible on its Western side, where artistic interventions took place in the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of Western press photographers, West Berliners and people visiting West Berlin looked at and across the Berlin Wall and introjected it in form of an image. A strict ban on images of the Berlin Wall on its Eastern side by the GDR government, which also heavily restricted access to the border zone in East Berlin, resulted in the production and accumulation of images taken from the Western side of the Wall. I argue that the fetishization of the Western perspective onto the Wall and the fetishization of the Western Wall has continued after the demolition of the Wall and German reunification in 1990. While the production of the one-sided Western visual regime, which Sunil Manghani (2008) regarding the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, defined as Berlin Imaginary, the wholesale identification with the Western point of view, is historically traced in this thesis, it is counteracted by a conceptual framework based on dialectical images. Walter Benjamin’s (1940) concept of history expressed in the dialectical image, which re-surfaces in the present and reveals the truth of a historical constellation in a flash, is re-fracted through Georges Didi-Huberman’s (2008) differentiation between veil- and tear-images. Both, veil- and tear-images as fetish and fact, are regarded as historically significant and the concept is applied to the analysis of images of and on the Western side of the Berlin Wall. I argue that the distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2019), the distribution of veil- and tear-images of and on the Berlin Wall had a geopolitical impact and needs to be acknowledged in the present. At the same time a Western directed, historical, and linear narration of events at the Berlin Wall has given way to, what Achim Landwehr (2016) calls historical wickerwork, where present and absent times interact and form specific historical constellations at specific times. The Berlin Wall as material barrier and military fortification, obstructing and dividing up space, is analysed as fetishized screen, screening off the other side, as membrane, filtering socio-economic flows and as protective shield invested with utopian desire for the building of socialism in the GDR. I argue that due to the complex functions of the Berlin Wall and the aestheticization of its Western side an almost schizophrenic tension emerged between the Western aestheticized frontline Wall and the Eastern military hinterland Wall and its border zone. I use Spyros Papapetros’ (2012) concept of an architecture of psychic excitation and Gilles Deleuze’s (1993) reading of Leibniz’ concept of the monad as fold exemplified in the Baroque house to show the workings of the Berlin Wall as paradoxical, aestheticized material structure in space. Pleasing as well life-threatening, the Berlin Wall triggered effects as well as affects, traced by the production of illusionistic images such as trompe l’oeils and their illusion-destroying other–anamorphic images as well as the illusion of images in motion on and of the Berlin Wall. As a result, the Berlin Wall emerges as surface for aesthetic interventions, as interface between East and West as well as biopolitical agent encircling a bounded existence. Because of the entanglement between matter, the sensing of matter and making sense of it at a specific historical moment and over time, the aim of this thesis has been to develop a multi-perspectival framework, which considers present hegemonic and absent perspectives, present and absent times (the present, the past and the future), the Wall’s materiality as well as the imprints it has left on the psyche due to its always already divided, Janus-faced structure. In this way the history of the Berlin Wall as sight and site is theorized, running counter to conventional accounts, which strictly differentiate between the two. This thesis argues that at the overdetermined border (Balibar 2002) between East and West Berlin during the Cold War sight and site conditioned each other and thus have to be thought together.

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