The Berlin Wall 50 Years On: Symbol of Division, and of Hope

Philip White



This past weekend, German citizens turned out en masse to recognize the 50th anniversary of East German authorities putting up the Berlin Wall. Coming 15 years after Winston Churchill’s Sinews of Peace speech, this barrier was the embodiment of the Iron Curtain that the British Prime Minister (ex-PM at the time) had spoken of in March 1946. The Wall not only carved Berlin in twain, but also the political and philosophical world–with liberal democracies with capitalist economic models on the western side and the totalitarian Communist regimes on the eastern.



Many desperate souls from the east (at least 136 reported, with many other likely not counted) died trying to get over the wall and with each failed attempt, the dreams of families hoping for a different life in the west perished, too. The commemoration in Berlin was no celebration, but rather a somber affair marked by church bells pealing out and flags billowing in the breeze at half-mast on the Reichstag. In the spot where the wall stood is now a chapel, which held a memorial service for those who lost their lives during the Wall’s 28-year history.



Before the concrete monstrosity went up, more than 2.5 million Germans had gone to the Allied occupation zones in the west of the city, according to The Daily Telegraph. One of the reasons for constructing the wall was the fear that this flight would leave the eastern part of the city economically destitute. Yet it was also, in many ways, a barrier to keep things out, not least “dangerous” Western ideas about freedom of the ballot box, speech and expression. The 96 miles of guard-patrolled, barbed wire-topped fortification also served the purpose of keeping Western officials and journalists out of Communist Eastern Germany and the nations beyond, preventing them from exposing the continued abuses of power and suppression of individual rights there.



Though it seemed so intimidating and so permanent for so long, the Berlin Wall was only as strong as the Soviet Union and its puppet regimes that had conceived it. By the time Ronald Reagan famously issued his June 1987 plea at the Brandenburg to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”, the bedrock of the U.S.S.R. was already cracking under the pressure of freedom movements in Eastern Europe, an unsustainable military budget, and a flagging economy, not to mention the flourishing of new political ideas within Moscow’s halls of power.



The fall of the Wall two and a half years later, on November 9, 1989, did not solve Germany’s problems, and, in fact, the convergence of two radically different populations presented many new challenges. However, its demise was the symbolic nail in the coffin of the U.S.S.R. and thus, half a century after its creation, the Berlin Wall invokes thoughts of hope, as much as sorrow.

Kaiser Wilhelm: Out of the Spotlight

Randall Stephens

What happened to Kaiser Wilhelm (1859-1941) after Germany lost World War I in 1918?

I'd never given that a thought until I read a witty, sprawling chapter in Ian Buruma's Anglomania: A European Love Affair. (A great read. Highly recommended.) Would the Kaiser fall on his sword? Attempt one last suicidal advance? March on Berlin to crush the revolution? Start a mustache grooming college?

No. "Instead," says Buruma, "the kaiser and his entourage, twelve military officers and thirty servants, including his barber, his chambermaids, his butler, his cooks, his doctor, his equerry, and his old cloakroom attendant, 'Father' Schulz, crossed the Dutch border, bound for the hospitality of Count Godard Bentinck's castle at Amerongen. The kaiser's first request, upon his arrival, was to have 'a cup of real good English tea.' He got his tea, served with English scones."

The fallen Prussian leader did more than work on his Rococo mustache, which, upturned, always looked like it was ready to take flight. He liked to dress up in various uniforms. He spent a great deal of time felling trees, a sort of compulsive hobby of his called "hackeritis." And he railed against the Jews and the English. Sometimes, he imagined them as one in the same. The kaiser was a comic, tragic, repulsive figure.

He kept a very tightly organized schedule. He spent the remainder of his life with his crew, venting, storming, and musing on current events and the future of the Aryan race. His was a toxic brew of race hatred and paranoia. (In Buruma's telling, the kaiser carried a bundle of grudges, fears, and troubles. Not least of those, his arm, paralyzed from birth, gave him a sense of physical inadequacy that he never quite overcame.)

Buruma zeros in on Wilhelm's tortured relationship with the English, and especially his English mother, "Vicky," and his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He vacillated between Anglophile and Anglophobe. Wilhelm was drawn to and repelled by the English and Englishness. In Buruma's estimation, he suffered from a Freudian sense of inferiority. Wilhelm built up the German navy to best his rival across the channel. He thundered against the effete English aristocracy and it's liberal shopkeepers. They were no match for the proud, uniformed, manly, Prussian military man.

Powerless, the kaiser could only dream about teutonic Wagnerian glory from his Dutch exile. His ravings became more maniacal with the passing years. (Surely someone has written a novel, a play, or a short story about his Dutch years? Exile on Kaiserstraße?)

The whole account would be far more comic if the kaiser's bizarre, super-charged bigotry wasn't shared by so many others in the years before his death. Reading Buruma's chapter gave me a new appreciation for Hannah Arendt's coinage "the banality of evil."

Dispatches from the Historical Society, Day 2: Christian Identities in Modern Germany

Randall J. Stephens

This Friday session, which I chaired, took place after lunch, when bellies were full and eyes were heavy. Attendees trickled in until we had a good number. The presenters engaged us on historical-theological change and continuity in Modern Germany.

Ryan Glomsrud (Harvard University) asked: How do we summarize and describe the context of theologians and philosophers? What counts as appropriate contextualization for a theologian a cultural critic, or a moral philosopher, like Karl Barth? How do we concretize some of these ideas with social and theological context?

In Glomsrud's view, Pietism is the forgotten religious context for 19th century religion and Weimar Germany. Glomsrud challenges the abstract categories--imminent, gnostic, transcendent--used to describe theologians and public intellectuals.

Pietists organized themselves around projects--youth conferences and the like. Barth launched his career in this world. Journals attached to the Pietist 19th century movement served as the bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Glomsrud finds a continuity in this model from one century to the next. And he asks historians to think about how this continuity might reshape what we think of the tumultuous changes of the 20th century.

Late 19th-century ecumenism certainly drew on new sentiments in Europe. Thomas Albert Howard (Gordon College) focused on the return of religious history in the ecumenical and confessional age. His paper “Christian Unity in a Secular and Confessional Age: Ignaz von Döllinger, Vatican I, and the Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875,” answered questions about why these conferences took place, what occured at them, and what they tell us about the era. The theological consensus fell apart, commented Howard, when Catholics questioned the participation of Anglicans. The center could not hold.

So what does this tell us about the era? Howard noted the severe limits of thinking of the 19th century as a second confessional age. But also it was no secular age either. Ecumenism was limited for a variety of reasons. Still, the legacy of the Bonn conferences lived on into the 20th century.

Nicholas Brooks (University of Virginia) began with a quote, "Paul has become fashionable again." Perhaps that is in response to the postsecular age or to his reimagining/reevaluation by Gary Wills and others.

Brooks's paper “Interpreting St. Paul for the New Germany: Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth, 1920-22,” considered the views of Barth and Heidegger on Paul. Those views, said Brooks, revealed a very specific pattern in 20th century thought and marked a break with the previous century. Where Glomsrud saw continuity, Brooks saw discontinuity. In Brooks's words: "Barth's and Heidegger's readings of Paul might be situated in the history of Paul-interpretation, and how in invoking Paul's writings, Barth and Heidegger in similar ways signaled their divergence from the intellectual and cultural heritage of the nineteenth century while providing footing for the beginning of a new era in Weimar and European culture more broadly."

Heidegger viewed Paul as an existential type that took on greater relevance in the 20th century. Paul's religion was not the religion of Jesus, thought Heidegger.

The Paul the Heidegger and Barth offered was different from the liberal version, argued Brooks. Paul's religion does not look to a unified whole, Heidegger thought. Real religion presents the world in a kind of radical chaos. It is mutable. Barth and Heidegger launched very different projects using Paul. Heidegger takes a very serious vision of finitude. Barth conceives of God as wholly other and takes on a "post-metaphysical" outlook. The work of both Barth and Heidegger on Paul had special resonance for Westerners in mid-century.

Tal Howard used Freud's term "the return of the repressed" to speak about the trouble in intellectual history with regard to religion. Each of the panelists was thinking through how theologians, divines, and philosophers reenvisioned faith or belief in a supposedly increasingly secular era. Religion has returned, though, and religious studies and religious history is strong. (See the theme for the 2011 AHA!) And these papers were great examples of the strength of the field.

Posted Soon: Videos from two other sessions. The Internet connection here is as slow as Christmas.