behind the berlin wall east germany and the frontiers of power jan 2010

[...]... China for other precedents After the annihilation of Varus’s legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 , the Roman Empire withdrew behind the Rhine and Danube, reinforcing natural defences with an artificial perimeter—or limes of roads and forts, fronted by palisades and fencing.⁴ Nevertheless, it could not ward off the Vandals and Goths, nor prevent the sacking of Rome 400 years later As the Roman Empire... right of emigration, guaranteeing freedom of travel only ‘within the state territory’.¹⁵ The Berlin Wall had become the wall of walls, a reductio ad absurdam of the modern state’s obsessive desire to regulate its interior Yet not all frontiers are visible Our language is suffused with border metaphors reflecting power structures and no-go areas every bit as real as ⁹ John Torpey, The Invention of the. .. historical writing on Germany s division Twenty years after its demise, we often cannot see the Wall for the bricks At the other extreme, however, ‘anti-totalitarians’ have treated the Wall as a metonym for a reductionist, black -and- white stereotyping of the GDR, and thus a foil for greater historical complexity One volume on state and society in East Germany punningly titled itself The Limits of Dictatorship.³³... 1961, The Wall remained a simultaneous monument to power and impotence’.³⁵ The influential American historian Charles Maier has also advocated a broader view: The Wall at the frontier had made possible all the walls within; the GDR had been a regime of walls, the most effective being those within its citizens’ heads’.³⁶ Even before it fell, GDR dissidents labelled it the tip of the iceberg’ of a more... ‘go west’ The open border offered loopholes to dictatorship, and the negotiation of power between gatekeepers and citizenry was not always stacked in the state’s favour Its short-term victories, such as 13 August 1961, stored up the seeds of future problems, as Chapters 7 and 8 will show The book traces the ebbs and flows of this asymmetric conflict Many of those East Germans confined within the system... Wall intelligentsia, the Mittelstand , and women of all classes, than it was for other groups.¹⁰⁴ Furthermore, the special status of travel petitions is revealed by the fact that from the 1970s the security section of the SED’s Central Committee, in conjunction with the MfS, became the arbiter on travel and emigration Indeed, the vast majority of its surviving files consist of alphabetized special pleading... sense of East Germany s fragile existence on the eve of the Wall, we must turn to the dual foreign and domestic crises at the Cold War’s epicentre: in Berlin ¹⁰⁴ Felix M¨ hlberg, ‘Eingaben als Instrument informeller Konfliktbew¨ltigung’, in Badst¨ bner u a u (ed.), Befremdlich anders, 237 ¹⁰⁵ See Mary Fulbrook’s survey in the final chapter of id (ed.), Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation... and to Return to his Country (New York: United Nations, 1963), 4 and 58 ¹⁵ J K A Thomaneck and James Mellis (eds), Politics, Society and Government in the German Democratic Republic: Basic Documents (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 50–67 4 Behind the Berlin Wall border checkpoints.¹⁶ This book is also about the invisible frontiers of power staked out behind the literal walls Sociologist Max Weber was among the. .. vindictive, and investigating the impact of high politics at the grass roots, we may better understand the human dimensions of the Wall. ⁴² Moreover, what even many theoretical accounts implicitly overlook is that, for over a third of its existence, from 1945–61, East Germany remained unwalled Only from 1961–89 was it the more familiar closed society One of my aims is to draw attention to this early phase and. .. an ‘overpowered society’ According to Klaus Schroeder: The frontiers of power are reached only when the power- wielders no longer encounter obedience among the security forces, police or army to the forcible implementation of their interests’.²⁰ This does seem a narrow definition, reflecting the political scientist’s fixation on the state, and omitting society from the equation Yet theorists and cultural .