After the Berlin Wall: Germany and Beyond ed. by Katharina Gerstenberger and Jana Evans Braziel (review)

A few collections of articles have appeared in recent years on the occasion of the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s removal and subsequent German unification. For the twentieth anniversary of these events there are Berlin Divided City, 1945–1989, edited by Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, and The German Wall: Fallout in Europe, edited by Marc Silberman. Similarly, the collection of essays that is the object of this review is the result of an interdisciplinary conference on the Berlin Wall held at the University of Cincinnati on November 9, 2009. Whereas the city itself serves as starting point of the essays in the volumes mentioned above, the aim of this volume is to view the centrality of Berlin in its global and historical context. What distinguishes this volume is that Berlin’s destruction, division, and subsequent unification serve as watershed events and contexts in which to talk about a host of topics that afford the volume an indispensable global and interdisciplinary scope.

The editors did not reserve space for themselves among the contributors and instead confine their remarks to a thoughtful introduction that lays out the choice of Berlin as a trope of division and unity. There we learn from Gerstenberger and Braziel that the volume offers a necessary reconsideration of the Reagan-Thatcher-Kohl years. This decade should not be viewed as a triumph of neoliberalism, they correctly claim, especially given the economic turmoil of 2008. They also perceptively remind us that the Wall’s absence has as much to do with Berlin’s identity and global significance as its physical presence had during its existence between 1961–89. For the editors Berlin serves as a starting point from which to think about elements of globalization and transnational linkages. Just as the title claims, the articles devote themselves to topics that are historically located after the Wall comes down. This does not preclude reflection on the past in the solid scholarship that marks every piece in this collection.

The articles that accentuate the mobility and creative transferability of Berlin Wall discussions to other cultures and contexts constitute one of the attractive features of this collection. Two articles convincingly show that transferability in terms of cultural location. Shannon Granville discusses the Master Keaton graphic novels and the manner in which Germany’s division is absorbed into a product of Japanese popular fiction to stress the need for reflection about the devastation of World War II by two axis countries. Daniel Purdy analyzes German media and their penchant to view Beijing as a negative model for city transformation. In Beijing the skyscraper has been a welcome solution to a shortage of housing and business space, a style that finds little tolerance with Berlin city planners. Christine Leuenberger speaks of that very mobility when she discusses the way in which physical walls come to occupy the human psyche. And nowhere are Berlin’s divisions more prevalent than those that transfer into the minds of persons affected by the physical borders that governments erect. Paul Kubicek too argues along the lines that the division as set in the minds of Germans have served to allow East Germans to think of the past in nostalgic terms while embracing paradoxically (like their West German fellow citizens) the beliefs essential to a functioning western democracy. His piece carries implications of what might have been a perfect society that never came to pass given that social security, availability of education, low crime rates, and gender equity were GDR strengths while the united Germany (read: West Germany) excelled in terms of individual freedom, political institutions, and the high living standard.

Foreign policy oriented pieces such as Jonathan Murphy’s remind us of the importance that Poland played in making German unification palpable and ultimately acceptable to the European powers most jittery about the prospects of a unified Germany. While Robert Snyder and Timothy...