Border Technologies and Terrains: Fallibility at the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall, the most visible part of the former Iron Curtain, was far from “concretely” static. While the Wall has been cast as emblematic of hard-border theory, as a “fault line” between East and West (Agnew & Corbridge 1995), in practice it constituted a series of faulty lines. Its stasis of stone and steel was emblematic of Cold War tensions, but it was not achieved in terms of function. The Wall, designed for the GDR’s self-“containment” from the West, evolved into a terrain and system of surveillance that never achieved absolute closure. Rather, its porous panopticism was marked by spatial and political vents and fissures. “Membrane” is an apt term for the Wall, suggestive of its permeability even at its apparently most closed (Lefebvre 1991). Referring to West and East German border documents from the Wall’s 28-year-tenure (at the Bundesarchiv Koblenz and Bundesarchiv Militärarchiv Freiburg), I identify collaborative roles along the inner German border. Whether at geopolitical or local levels, or in maintaining and updating the border system, both sides of the Wall became part of an interdependent (im)material network (Ladd 1998, Sheffer 2011). What emerges is an interrelationship between Cold-War border technologies and the populations separated thereby. In urban historical terms, the (West’s) notions about the Wall’s disfiguration of Berlin and its halting of normal urban development (Koolhaas & Mau 1995, Leach 1999) have to be adjusted in light of how the border system forged the two Cold-War Berlins into different propinquities of exchange and co-existence. Even the aestheticization of the Wall was something that the East German government consciously worked on as a West-facing image of the state (Briese 2011). Nowadays the demolished Wall is part of reunified Berlin’s self-memorialization, and new perspectives on Berlin’s paradigmatic urbanism can be gained concerning this structure’s evolutionary agency.