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• Selected Topic: Berlin Wall
  • 1945-1961: from WWII to the Wall
  • 1961-1989: the years of the Wall
  • 1989: the Wall falls
  • 20 years afterwards
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20 years afterwards...

Berlin: reunification or unification?

In 1972, a new Constitution was adopted in the GDR, formalising very officially the creation of two distinct States, and therefore two nationalities. Even so, did two national identities exist really?  Forty years of separation had contributed on both sides of the Wall to the elaboration of two conceptions of the German identity.  Reunification had resulted in a movement of population towards the rich West Germany, thus creating a new category of internal immigrants (übersidler). Between 1989 and 1990, nearly 400,000 East Germans migrated to West Germany.

Trace of the Berlin Wall (photo: eludunet, flickr)

On 19 June 1991, Berlin became the capital of the reunified Germany. A new Germany was born.

In the unified Berlin, the passerby could discover all over the city still visible traces of the former separation.

In 2001, the ethnologist Marc Augé recounted in his article "La frontière ineffaçable, Un ethnologue sur les traces du mur de Berlin" about a walk around Berlin, the difficult and slow "healing"  that was taking place after the reunification of the two Germanys.

In Berlin the wall is no more, but elsewhere...  

The Wall, Jenin, Palestine (photo: tr3regine, Flickr)

A child born in East Germany in 1989 is an adult today. Since that time he has at least obtained the legal right to move around on both sides of the Wall that has disappeared. Not all the children born after 1989 have had the same good luck. Other walls have sprung up elsewhere, restricting people's movements and exchanges.

Notably in Mexico, Ceuta, and Palestine.

Wall of Ceuta, 2005 (dunmurlautre.net, Flickr)

In Europe, the Schengen Agreements have removed frontiers for European citizens but have reinforced frontiers and reduced the possibilities of access for non-Europeans.

Paradoxically, 20 years later, the world is transformed by the speed with which information circulates as if any sense of distance has disappeared, but at the same time, the circulation of people remains impeded by a myriad of new legal, political, social or economic restrictions of access that constitute a whole series of new walls.