After the Berlin Wall

Jana Evans Braziel

"Twenty years after its fall, the wall that divided Berlin and Germany presents a conceptual paradox: on one hand, Germans have sought to erase it completely; on the other, it haunts the imagination in complex and often surprising ways. Similarly, Cold War divisions resonate in the global image of the "New Germany." Several overlapping themes run through the essays: the exportation of German post-wall debates into other cultural contexts and representations of the Wall within non-German settings; the emergence of visual, literary, and psychological imagery derived from the Berlin Wall well beyond its existence; the importance of space, geographical, political, as well as imagined, in the aftermath of the Wall; and the continued artistic as well as socio-historical engagement with East Germany as a state that no longer exists but whose memory reverberates in sometimes unexpected ways...