Marc Silberman, Karen Till and Janet Ward (eds) Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe, Berghahn, New York and Oxford, 2012. 338 pages, 19 illustrations. $ 85.00, £ 53.00, ISBN: 978-0-85745-504-8.

This is a book of short essays that bridges diverse political themes and histories, disciplinary backgrounds, and geographical scales through a resolute engagement with motifs of division. The essays share an empirical focus on the cities and border-zones of post Cold-War Europe, and a conceptual interest in complex processes of social and spatial identity formation. A distinctive recurring theme is  the materiality of specific boundaries—especially of the host of partitioning walls that have been built and dismantled in Europe through the course of the twentieth century—and the durability, as well as mutability, of such ‘constructions’. The editors situate the collection within the  trans-disciplinary field of border studies. Case studies breach usual divisions through their content, but also through the range of theoretical traditions they represent.

These case studies illuminate the histories and geographies of city walls, border zones, and migrating boundaries. In each intervention  we are invited to consider how physical walls have divided historically, but have also served as shaping factors in subsequent processes of socio-spatial change. We also follow the socio-cultural transformations of border communities as they are reconstituted by physical and metaphorical walls during and after the Cold War. In this the book also marks a tense and edgy exploration of small-scale attempts to navigate the morally uncertain territories surrounding borders—to sometimes constructive, and at other times more ambivalent, ends. Three main themes underpin the collection in relation to the main theme of dividing wall: the role of aesthetics, the reproduction of various (social and cultural) boundaries, and the contested histories of Berlin. Rather than reviewing each chapter in publication order, I will structure the rest of this review accordingly.

Aesthetics and the border

The explicit language of aesthetics is seldom used in the collection. However, a vocabulary of art and artistic practice are rarely absent from its essays. The editors frame their own concern with such matters in relation to the potential subversion of dominant orders of sense and visibility. They reference a heritage of spatial thought that includes De Certeau, Lefebvre, and post-structural concerns with constitutive ‘Others’. The Berlin Wall, for example, illustrates the immense power of walls, borders, and boundaries ‘to signify and symbolize on a scale far greater than [a] literal ability to separate, defend, or guard’ (page 6), whilst also forming a concrete site of micro-histories and gestures that escape this over-arching significance. The fall of the Berlin Wall marks an ‘epistemic break’ in  accounts of the nation-state (page 17), because it marks the end of an old order of division, but also because it complicates an old order of scholarship that neglected the role of spatial and cultural practices in sustaining (and reworking) boundaries. After Derek Gregory, the authors  define  their project a deliberate act of ‘interference’ with the usual codings, from which ‘all sorts of fusions become possible’ (page 8).

The haunting presence of the Berlin Wall elicits other walls, such as the Israeli security barrier and the US-Mexico crossing, and the collective identities emerging from their ‘harsh asymmetries’ (page 9). Although not all the essays share such deconstructive approach, this aesthetic emphasis is notably continued in chapters 3 (‘Threshold resistance?’), 8 (‘Migrants, mosques, and minarets’), and 11 (‘Crossing boundaries in Cyprus’). These contributions share a positive valuation of the unexpected encounters taking place despite walls and boundaries. In chapter 3, for example, Professor of German Studies Eric Jaroskinski contributes to what the editors term a ‘politics of cultural mutability’ by considering an installation in Berlin constructed by the Israeli artist and activist Dani Karavan. The installation was part of a larger project (‘Kunst am Bau’) aimed at increasing public acceptance of the Reichstag and surrounding parliamentary buildings. To an extent, however, the installation subverts the project by problematising transparency and democracy within the prevailing architectural idiom. The installation comprises a small sculpture garden enclosed by a glass wall, on which are engraved the constitutional foundational rights established in 1949. Jaroskinski reflects on the way Karavan’s work plays with notions of  transparency and opaqueness, of accessibility and enclosure. The wall is both a window and a barrier.  As a ‘self-naturalising synthesis of aesthetics and politics’ (page 61), Jaroskinski concludes that the installation is ‘ideally suited to the contradictory task of site-specific political cosmopolitanism’ (page 66) in the context of post-1989 Berlin. It avoids the category of ‘state art’, but reflects political aspects of the city’s past. In this sense it critically destabilises  ‘scopic regimes’ (page 70), whilst playfully introducing a new grammar of spatial and cultural practices into existing  economies of artistic production.

Aesthetics and contested representation are also foregrounded in Patricia Ehrkamp’s piece (chapter 8), which focuses on Islamophobia within contemporary landscapes of immigration and citizenship in Western Europe. Ehrkamp is interested in the ways democratic rights and responsibilities are being reworked through new debates over cultural assimilation, especially in relation to contested symbols such as minarets and veils. As in Jaroskinski’s chapter, Ehrkamp highlights the strategies of aesthetic policing which are triggered when the moral community’s edges are threatened. She also traces the emergence of new forms of co-dwelling from the formation of new ‘political’ actors and demands for equality. Thus an Islamic activist group succeeds in gaining acceptance for a new mosque by framing it as a community centre that is ‘dignified and well integrated’ in the urban landscape and creates bilateral cultural communication (page 165). In the process, the boundaries of democracy’s universalism are productively redrawn.

Gülgün Kayim returns to this theme in the last  chapter of the book. Kayim is an artist and refugee from Turkish Cyprus. In a highly personalised account, she contrasts cultural practices that repress experiences of violence and war with artistic possibilities. She reflects on the simple gestures and narratives which have shaped antagonism in Cyprus (the commander draws a line on a map with a green wax pencil; a naive strategy for police recruitment results in an almost inclusively Turkish force regulating a majority Cypriot population), and documents the coordinates that shaped her own life and artistic practice. Her aesthetic experimentations are offered as potential collective routes forward. This chapter elicits above all an enduring sense of hopefulness which resonates beyond the difficult and tense worlds broached within the volume.

Reproducing boundaries

Other chapters in the volume emphasise the spatial and cultural practices through which past boundaries are reproduced and transformed. Thus in chapter 1 (‘The dialectics of urban form in Absolutist France’) Yair Mintzker approaches Europe’s borders from a historiographical  perspective. He explores the walled city in Absolutist France as a ‘model’ for fortification that informed subsequent transformations to state boundaries. Before the seventeenth century a French city was defined by its walls: it was a ‘walled settlement’ that policed and taxed itself (page 26). But between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the ramparts of cities were dismantled as part of an extension of sovereign territory, whilst newly pooled resources were channelled into creating firm border edges at the national boundaries. The chapter continues the book’s emphasis on the cultural mutability of boundaries. Mintzker points out that officials did not aim at turning France into a fortified state on the model of the fortified city. Instead, the city walls served as metaphors and models for the defence of a state within military discourse, with unpredicted effects. In chapter 7 (‘Moving borders and competing civilizing missions’), Steffi Marung continues this theme of mutually constitutive border histories and built environments. She interrogates the integration of new countries into the EU after the Cold War, again demonstrating how the translation of past boundaries and tensions into new political situations may produce  unexpected effects. For example, Poland’s efforts to simultaneously stabilise itself and create new inter-state partnerships led to the re-conceptualisation of the EU’s eastern edges as ‘bridges’ and ‘transit spaces’  beyond the former Iron curtain (page 143).

Within some essays this idea of the wall as a model for cultural reproduction offers an alternative form of critique to the tactical subversion put forward by the editors. For example, in chapter 4 (‘Did the walls really come down?’) Mattar revisits three analogies or empirical cases (it is not clear which) of simultaneously material and cultural walling to account for the continued pervasiveness of social orderings according to a ‘dualistic logic’ in Europe after the Schengen agreement. She concludes that ‘walls are still in vogue’ (page 78). The different forms of wall or boundary that now influence identity formation—including ‘peace lines, fear walls, anti-immigration walls, and a number of more liminal and invisible devices’ (page 87)—are barriers  ‘that aim to b/order our daily forms of exchange and coexistence’ (ibid.). The account demonstrates the pervasive reproduction and diversification of spatial and cultural boundaries in a new Europe, without illuminating the various forms of subversion which have accompanied these transformations. In this sense Mattar's chapter stands as an example of the less optimistic thread through the volume, in which the wall is a model for social change, rather than a site of new crossings and productions.

There is a critique to be made of the tendency within this thread to ‘exemplify’ the pervasiveness of walls, which finds new boundaries everywhere, and so tends to reify abstract forces of power or sovereignty. However, other chapters combine an attention to reproducing boundaries with an insistence on ‘irreducible and subversive’ (page 7) capacities of the body, refusing any overarching teleology. Thus in chapter 5 (‘Border guarding as social practice’), Muriel Blaive and Thomas Lindenberger draw from oral histories a compassionate and sensitive micro-historical account of a small Czech town on the Austrian border, České Velenice. The authors follow how, under communist governance, an existing transcript of non-communist, national (anti-Austrian) values became translated into a public transcript of communist legitimisation. However, emphasis falls on the small-scale negotiations which led to the reproduction of old boundaries in new forms. Complex lines of betrayal and complicity enabled the ethnic and political homogenisation of the border-town, whilst the routes individuals forged to secure uncertain futures gave rise to the overwhelming culture of self-policing. Such nuance is echoed in Isa Blumi’s essay (chapter 9: ‘Not our kind’), which focuses on the absence of Kosovar Albanians within German integration strategies. The domestic agendas of sending countries (for example, ethno-national homogenisation) have tended to be ignored in strategies for organising incoming populations, and, Blumi argues, in scholarly analysis. Thus the migrant labour force in post-war Germany was organised according to reductive categories of ‘Greeks’, ‘Turks’, and ‘Yugoslavs’, and ignored the significant number of incoming Kosovar Albanians, most of whom were fleeing targeted discrimination in Yugoslavia. Many were compelled to identify outwardly with the Yugoslav population to gain practical access to resources, but this survival strategy reinforced intergenerational legacies of shame and isolation. Returning to remembered and repressed experiences, Blumi reflects on the lack of Kosovar representation in an emergent political landscape, and its enduring consequences.

Mintzker and Blumi both focus on the new kinds of division produced through cultural processes, rather than identifying specific points of hopeful transformation. However, by foregrounding the complexities of lived experience both chapters draw our attention to the multitudinous processes in play in the making of present places. The transformative potential of unvoiced sensibilities, and the accompanying themes of translation, mediation, and the ‘brokering’ of history are a powerful thread running through and beyond the collection.

Berlin’s contested histories

The notion of constitutive absences and their potential politics is especially reinforced  through the reiterative returns to Berlin throughout of the book. We return to Berlin and its invisibilities in chapters 2, 3, 6 and 10. In the last (‘Invisible migrants’), cultural anthropologist Jeffrey Jurgens revisits the Turkish immigrant families who do not appear in narratives of Berlin’s division and reunification, crystallising the tensions through one specific incident: the drowning of a five year-old son of a Turkish guest-worker family, Cetin Mert. Jurgens emphasises the contestation between the East and West Berlin police services (the river  belonged to the GDR, but Mert fell into it from a West Berlin bank) and the subsequent processes of (non-)memorialisation. Turkish migrants are conspicuously absent from public memory and the critical scholarship surrounding the wall, whilst those who are remembered are encrypted in the form of constitutive absences. Thus Cetin’s grave is today a monument on the tourist map, but is dedicated ‘to an unknown refugee’ (page 200), when he was neither unknown, nor a refugee. As in previous chapters we are invited to consider the construction of a new ‘wall’ in Berlin—between former residents and labour migrants.

In chapter 2 (‘The camp in the city, the city as camp’) Olaf Briese continues this theme of contested histories by focusing explicitly on the remaking of ‘camps’ in the post-war period. The chapter tends toward the Agambenian penchant toward exemplification recurring elsewhere in the book (‘“the camp” and modernity belong together, like twins’, page 44). Briese’s fascinating documentation of the architectural transformations and singularities of Berlin disrupts tendencies toward an overly-idealised account of exclusion. The narratives of reinvented spatial environments provide an inroad to understanding the pursuit of ‘ideal’ camps, the ideological traffic between Nazi ideas and post-war management of the refugee crisis, and the administrative, rather than penal, level at which social exclusion is being remade (page 57). As such the piece constitutes a gentle riposte to Agamben: rather than being embedded in predatory logics of sovereignty, the camps’ future transformations are anchored in technical materialities.

In chapter 6 (‘A complicated contrivance’) David Barclay draws together Berlin’s material histories with its alternative aesthetic potentialities. His account revisits Berlin behind the wall as a site of  drama and epic personalities—the epicentre of the Cold War—together with the gradual demographic hollowing and cultures of experimentation fostered by the Allied occupation. The ‘oddly dialectical relationship’ between the Allies’ presence and the emergent, ‘curious’ socio-political cultures of West Berlin (page 125) hinge upon the immense shadow of the Wall, which, all the same, formed an increasingly invisible backdrop like another ‘piece of furniture’ (page 122). Perhaps more than any other chapter Barclay’s essay illuminates how the maintenance of ordinary life can have enduring and unpredictable effects. Against the backdrop of the wall, politically alternative cultures have survived in Berlin like perhaps nowhere else in Europe. These include new kinds of tactical subversion such as squatting and anarchist direct action. Subversion and the reproduction of walls are shown to inflect one another.

Escaping autonomies

Can micro-histories really challenge the immensity of the Berlin Wall and its legacies? Do acts of artistic and tactical subversion carry the weightiness to overhaul the forms of spatial and cultural exclusion documented in this book? The collection gives more space  to the reproduction and multiplication of walls and boundaries in the post-War period than to the new conceptions of belonging signalled in its introduction. However this is not a criticism: in itself this congregation of interdisciplinary accounts helps demystify the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to destabilise the romanticisation of ‘post-wall’ eras. In a timely way the contributions also highlight the diversity of barriers and boundaries which anchor collective life in a world that sometimes claims for itself a kind of borderless universality. However the collection is at its sharpest when the autonomies of art, of the body, and of the material world are allowed to speak as loudly as persisting cultural and architectural divisions. Conspicuously absent from the book are accounts of a politics of bordered worlds which attend to these autonomies in conceptual terms—for example,  Jacques Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics, or New Materialism scholarship’s emphasis on the dynamic politics of bodies and matter. The persistence and insistence of unspoken sensibilities, excluded affections and untranslated movements make themselves known as a constitutive part of the weighty struggle for history within such moments, and it is these absent presences that continue to resonate beyond the concluding words of this book.