The Berlin Wall

The Editors: The three editors of this volume hold professorial rank and teach at The Pennsylvania State University in the fields of German Literature and History.
Ernst Schürer received his Ph.D. from Yale University. Since 1962 he has conducted much of his research in Berlin in the shadow of the Wall. In addition to articles and reviews in journals and anthologies, he has published the following: Georg Kaiser, George Kaiser and Bertolt Brecht; and Georg Kaiser. Von morgens bis mitternachts. Erläuterungen und Dokumente. He has edited: Lebendige Form. Interpretationen zur deutschen Literatur; B. Traven. Life and Work; Franz Jung. Leben und Werk eines Rebellen (Peter Lang, 1994); and plays by Georg Kaiser, Carl Sternheim, Ernst Toller, and Reinhard Sorge.
Manfred Keune focuses his research on German literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century and has written on Theodor Fontane, Fritz Reuter, B. Traven, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Günter Kunert. He co-edited Kunert Werkstatt and is working on a monograph about Günter Kunert.
Philip Jenkins was educated at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide, Pedophiles, and Priests: Anatomy of a Social Crisis. His current research project is entitled «Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania 1925-1950.»

The collection of essays presented in The Berlin Wall offers reflections on the Berlin Wall (1961-1989) from a wealth of interdisciplinary and international perspectives. The studies of literary and cultural texts - many not easily accessible to the English-speaking public - present the Wall as one of the most powerful phenomena and as a visible and decipherable text of twentieth-century life in the heart of Germany. Literary interpretations, cultural studies, and historical investigations combine to shed light on the "life" of the Wall as a key indicator of the paradoxes, contradictions, and complexities of Germany's history of division. The role of the Berlin Wall in the British espionage novel is investigated, as well as the overt and covert use of literary imagery referring to the Wall by German authors in their poetry, stories, novels, and plays in both the FRG and the GDR. Several essays concentrate on the representation of the Wall in popular culture, in contemporary songs, in the cinema, and even through the graffiti on the Wall itself. The final section focuses on the fall of the Wall and its aftermath. Although physically removed, the Berlin Wall will continue to live on in history and in the pages of this anthology as a symbol of the struggle between the most powerful ideologies of the twentieth century.