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The German WallPolitics, Culture, and Media before and after the berlin wall

The German Wall: Politics, Culture, and Media before and after the berlin wall [This chapter treats the political and cultural rationales that rose and fell with the Berlin Wall as well as the iconography that developed around the establishment and dissolution of the inner German border. While the standard narrative of the Wall references the brutal imprisonment of a whole country and the unexpected liberation in November 1989, there are some irritating contradictions in the story that need to be foregrounded and help to explain the transformation of the political rationale into cultural narratives in general and into metaphorical transpositions specifically. An examination of several films about the Wall produced in 1961 reveals— whether from the East or the West—how they share the conviction that the two German societies are incommensurable. Indeed, this proves to be symptomatic for almost all audiovisual productions depicting the Berlin Wall until 1989. Post-1989 depictions of the Wall, in contrast, only serve to emphasize the strong political orientation of the earlier films, for they no longer engage geopolitical issues but rather become self-reflexive, offering second-order representations of a superseded iconographie and semantic tradition.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

The German WallPolitics, Culture, and Media before and after the berlin wall

Part of the Studies in European Culture and History Book Series
Editors: Silberman, Marc
Wrage, Henning
The German Wall — Oct 19, 2015
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17 pages

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References (6)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2011
ISBN
978-1-349-29431-2
Pages
59 –76
DOI
10.1057/9780230118577_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter treats the political and cultural rationales that rose and fell with the Berlin Wall as well as the iconography that developed around the establishment and dissolution of the inner German border. While the standard narrative of the Wall references the brutal imprisonment of a whole country and the unexpected liberation in November 1989, there are some irritating contradictions in the story that need to be foregrounded and help to explain the transformation of the political rationale into cultural narratives in general and into metaphorical transpositions specifically. An examination of several films about the Wall produced in 1961 reveals— whether from the East or the West—how they share the conviction that the two German societies are incommensurable. Indeed, this proves to be symptomatic for almost all audiovisual productions depicting the Berlin Wall until 1989. Post-1989 depictions of the Wall, in contrast, only serve to emphasize the strong political orientation of the earlier films, for they no longer engage geopolitical issues but rather become self-reflexive, offering second-order representations of a superseded iconographie and semantic tradition.]

Published: Oct 19, 2015

Keywords: Political Rationale; German Border; Western Ally; Foreign Legion; Early Film

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