Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe ed. by Marc Silberman, Karen E. Till, and Janet Ward (review)

The so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences has given rise to a rapidly growing literature about the role and significance of borders and boundaries in different societies and cultures, much of it written from a more or less interdisciplinary perspective. The volume under review here is a highly welcome and useful addition to this body of scholarship. As the three editors explain in their clear, co-authored introduction, the book uses case studies from Europe’s recent past and contemporary setting to explore “how walls, borders and boundaries inform spatial and cultural practices” (5). In pursuit of that goal, the volume brings together scholars from several academic fields, including history, geography, anthropology, and Germanistik, in a fruitful effort to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and cooperation.

Given the prominence of the word “Wall” in the study’s title and in its introductory chapter, it is no surprise that Berlin and the infamous barrier that divided the city between 1961 and 1989 feature strongly in the eleven contributions that make up the volume. Four chapters deal specifically with Berlin and the realities or aftereffects of the city’s Cold War division. David E. Barclay, for instance, provides a lucid, engaging analysis of the culture of West Berlin between the early 1970s and late 1980s, arguing that the walled-in city lost its sense of mission after the advance of détente put an end to the earlier, more “heroic” period of East–West confrontation. Jeffrey Jurgens uses the largely forgotten death of a five-year-old Turkish boy, Cetin Mert, in the border waters between East and West Berlin in the spring of 1975 to explore the marginality of foreign migrants, especially the so-called Gastarbeiter, in wider narratives of identity and national belonging in postwar Germany. He argues persuasively that Mert’s relative neglect in the subsequent commemoration of the victims of the Berlin Wall reflects the more general peripheral status assigned to labor migrants in master narratives of Germany’s national history.

The book’s thoughtful and valuable contributions reach far beyond Berlin alone. Danielle Vicherat Mattar, for example, examines three other walls in contemporary Europe—one erected in the Italian city of Padua to isolate a neighborhood of poor immigrants, another constructed between the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in northern Morocco and its North African surroundings, and the third consisting of barriers partly separating Catholic and Protestant communities in Belfast—to suggest that although walls obviously divide, they can also have unexpected consequences of a more constructive kind: sometimes they end up promoting closer bonds between different communities and bringing cities together, developments exemplified in each of her case studies. Muriel Blaive and Thomas Lindenberger, in turn, use their co-authored chapter to explore the “social practice” (97) of border guarding in a small community on the Czech side of the former Iron Curtain between Czechoslovakia and Austria. Drawing in large part on concepts developed by Alf Lüdtke, their insightful contribution argues that, contrary to widespread popular perceptions, social reality was by no means shaped only by repression from above, even in this isolated and militarized community on the Eastern bloc’s Western frontier. Rather, the regime benefitted from a “tacit minimal consensus” (110) among the people, achieved through a system that built on particular national values and that distributed certain benefits to the population while also actively integrating much of it into the network of control and repression, primarily through various practices of denunciation.

Overall, Walls, Borders and Boundaries is a valuable collection of essays. As in any edited volume, some chapters engage with the shared themes of the study more closely than others. The theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, for instance, which form the conceptual backbone of the introduction, are not equally central to all of the subsequent chapters. But challenges like these are...