How to See the World by Nicholas Mirzoeff

Author:Nicholas Mirzoeff
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465096015
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

DIVIDED CITIES

During the Cold War, certain cities became separated and divided in ways that could not be ignored. If Paris was the paradigm of nineteenth-century imperial cities, Berlin was the classic city of the military-industrial complex (1947–90). Governed by the victorious war powers, it was divided by the monumental Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989. The city was visually split in dramatic fashion, equivalent to the clarity of the U2 photograph of Cuba (Figure 33). In Berlin, no visual work was required. You simply lost the ability to see the partitioned space. Although the Cold War is long over, divided cities are recurring and reviving in critical areas of global counterinsurgency, from Baghdad to Jerusalem and Kabul.

At the end of the Second World War, in 1945, Berlin was divided into four sectors, one controlled by each of the Allied powers, namely Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. On August 13, 1961, astonished Berliners awoke to find the former GDR (East Germany) building a wall between its sector of Berlin and the Western sector. For nearly thirty years, the wall served as both a symbol and the reality of Cold War separation. It was 87 miles long, 11 1/2 feet high, and surrounded with mines, dogs, lights, and other security devices. It cut through neighborhoods, separated friends and families, and provided the ultimate visible symbol of the Cold War. Although East Germans were able to learn about the West from television and radio broadcasts, their personal movement was directly limited by the wall. Subway lines eerily missed stations on “the other side.” Before the construction of the wall, as many as 3.5 million East Germans are estimated to have defected to the West. The wall made that almost impossible, although some six hundred people died in the attempt to cross it.

The official position of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the GDR was that “there exists no objective political or social basis for opposition to the prevailing societal and political order.” In other words, no sane person could oppose what the SED named its “comprehensive form of democracy.” Any opposition was therefore wrong and carefully monitored by the Stasi (Ministry for State Security). You can now visit its vast headquarters in East Berlin, which has been preserved as a museum. The Stasi had no expectation that its monitoring of the people would lead to better behavior; it simply wanted to control them. So, it regulated and determined the boundaries of acceptable behavior and held its fellow citizens accountable for any breaches of those boundaries. In the displays of Stasi equipment at the museum, you can see a 10-megabyte hard drive that was used to store information. As it is of late 1980s origin, the disk is 12 inches across and 6 high. It is surrounded with a display of the 5-inch floppy disks that were also used, as well as the mounds of paper generated by the constant surveillance. The display hints at a future that was yet to come—in 1989—but is now all around us.

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