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‘It has to go away, but at the same time it has to be kept’: the Berlin Wall and the making of an urban icon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2006

JOACHIM SCHLÖR
JOACHIM SCHLÖR
Affiliation:
Center for Jewish Studies, Potsdam University, PF 601553, D-14415 Potsdam, Germany
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Abstract

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.

What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.

Uwe Johnson

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , May 2006 , pp. 85 - 105
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Urban Icons

This package contains the source files for one of the Urban History multimedia companions created to accompany special issue Urban History volume 33, issue 1, by Philip J. Ethington & Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds.), and originally hosted as an online resource by Cambridge University Press. These files contain multimedia content in a now deprecated format, Adobe Flash. Please note that links to third party resources will be retained here in the original form provided by the compilers of the multimedia companions. The Press does not warrant that links from archival entries will continue to function correctly and does not undertake to redirect or suppress links when third party sites cease to be available

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