Scaling the ‘Wall in the Head’

[groovedaddy]

Walls are back in fashion. Walls and fences. Not long ago, you may recall, Republican presidential candidates expressed their devotion to them. In October Michele Bachmann signed a pledge to support the construction of a fence that would run the entire length of the United States-Mexico border. Not to be outdone, Herman Cain voiced his support for an electrified border fence, one juiced up enough to be lethal: Touch it and die. As someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, I happen to know how the device works; in a certain way, we invented it (we should have copyrighted it). The ability to cross the “lethal fence” used to be part of the East-European survival kit.

Of course, the issue has not gone away. Immigration was once again a third-rail topic in the most recent Republican debate. A visual message appeared this week in the media to reinforce it: The latest cover of The New Yorker magazine is a Thanksgiving-themed illustration by the artist Christoph Niemann that shows frightened Mayflower-era pilgrims breaching a barbed-wire fence in the desert.

While walls and fences are certainly physical things — imposing ones at that — a good deal of their power comes from elsewhere. As their role in political discourse makes clear, they are also things of the mind. And it is not a concept confined by American borders. The Germans, who seem to have a name for everything, use the phrase der Mauer im Kopf (“the wall in the head”) to refer to the phenomenon. The Berlin Wall may have been torn down long ago, but many people in Germany still feel divided; the wall is intact in their minds. (As a native of Germany, Niemann may know a thing or two about this.) Walls can be spectacular as architectural structures but they can be even more fascinating as entities that inhabit our thinking and shape cultures.

Walls, then, are built not for security, but for a sense of security. The distinction is important, as those who commission them know very well. What a wall satisfies is not so much a material need as a mental one. Walls protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears, which can often be more terrible than the worst vandals. In this way, they are built not for those who live outside them, threatening as they may be, but for those who dwell within. In a certain sense, then, what is built is not a wall, but a state of mind.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/scaling-the-wall-in-the-head/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

[Karenina]

1. DIE Mauer im Kopf...

Just marking for later should I decide to write more. ;-) I had many conversations over some years with Ossis on this topic. It was fascinating and enlightening.