Piecing History: The Strange Archival Afterlife of the Berlin Wall in American Culture

The Berlin Wall’s transformation from geopolitical barricade to cultural commodity and architectural ruin occurred within days of the opening of the East German border in November 1989. While countless individual tourists from around the world quickly became enamored collectors of the disassembled Wall, through sales or “wall pecking” while on-site in Berlin, several prominent American research institutions would also eventually enter pieces of the Wall into their archives. Numerous presidential libraries and national museums make claims about American history through their inclusions of the Wall in their collections, no matter the size or scope of such a holding. For example, a piece of the Berlin Wall from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, was included in the recent Smithsonian History of America in 101 Objects with an annotation qualifying it only by its existence as a fragment (“This one has special meaning precisely because it is broken!”), rather than as an outlier in this quintessential collection of “Americana.” Alternatively, the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, a private institution concerned with the outmoded material culture of the former Eastern bloc, holds multiple pieces of the Wall in both its archive and public venues with additional creative inscriptions about American cultural visions of freedom and repression. In each case, such material remnants of a divided Berlin have been displaced and recontextualized into archives that, in part, construct narratives about the United States during and after the Cold War.

In “Piecing History,” Farber considers the Berlin Wall as an unwieldy archival object in light of its current inclusion in a range of American institutional holdings. By considering several specific archival contexts – including particular methods of procurement, storage annotation, and display of the Wall – he weighs broader questions about historical and political legitimacy in Cold War memory debates.