Boundaries of Freedom: An American History of the Berlin Wall.

Abstract

“Boundaries of Freedom: An American History of the Berlin Wall” is an interdisciplinary study of representations of the Berlin Wall across American literature, art, and popular culture from 1961 to the present. The Berlin Wall is recalled prominently as the central symbol of the Cold War, and as the structural manifestation of the iron curtain division between West and East Germany, as well as the United States and the Soviet Union. I contend that the Berlin Wall emerged as an integral part of the transnational cultural imagination in the United States during the Cold War. For many Americans, the Berlin Wall reflected significant histories of social division – in particular, transnational, transhistorical, and intersectional accounts of the civil rights movement and the Cold War. This has been the case from the first days of the wall’s construction in 1961 through its dismantling in 1989, and carries on through its current afterlife as a dispersed monumental ruin and digitally rendered artifact. The Berlin Wall continues to be an important structure through which Americans critically engage their own evolving and interlinked notions of freedom and repression.

“Boundaries of Freedom” emphasizes the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class in a U.S.-focused history of the Berlin Wall, by studying the impact of creative non-state actors on political knowledge and archival knowledge of the Cold War period and beyond. I approach an American history of the Berlin Wall to consider the hundreds of cultural representations of the wall directed to U.S. audiences as points of entry to access the liminal spaces and fault lines of the nation. I highlight cultural works as historical and expressive sources, and employ transnational American studies methodologies. I look collectively at cultural productions that represent the history of the wall through narratives of transnational struggle and division in the United States. This is a study of the profound, paradoxical, and continued resonance of the Berlin Wall in American culture.