Hardeep Matharu explores the 30th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall and how and why the building of walls is making a worrying comeback – in the US and elsewhere.
A Curious Meeting
A year or so before Donald Trump announced his desire to occupy the White House, a bright young researcher was introduced to a man fascinated with culture.
How could it be changed? they mused.
The culture of a society, they concluded, was comprised of its people and their individual traits. If you could change how enough people felt and behaved, you could also shift the culture of the country in which they lived. If you wanted to change the culture, you had to change the people.
The researcher was tasked to find out more.
He instructed colleagues to sit before groups of Americans and speak to them about their country. Washington was dirty, they said, amongst other things. But, something else resonated. The pictures of walls and people scaling them which they were shown.
The 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall will be a “dark reckoning”.
Buoyed by what this then little-known company called Cambridge Analytica had found, the culture warrior – who would later become known as Trump’s campaign manager, right-wing media executive Steve Bannon – decided to put the results to good use. To Make America Great Again.
“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me,” Trump declared, announcing his presidential bid the following year. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”
The researcher who had spoken to Bannon, Chris Wylie, blew the whistle on his time at Cambridge Analytica last year, revealing that the data analytics firm stole millions of people’s Facebook data and subjected it to psychometric testing to determine how they could be ‘micro-targeted’ with online messaging to change their political behaviour.
Although he didn’t know it at the time, Wylie’s work at Cambridge Analytica would have a significant impact on Trump’s resonance with the American public. It also represented a concerning backwards step towards the exploitation of fear and anger in a politics of division and othering.
“Building the wall is not to stop immigrants – most come on a plane – it’s to embody separation,” Wylie said at the Frontline Club last year.
But, this was not an original idea.
Trump and Bannon’s obsession with building a US-Mexico border wall took inspiration, Wylie said, from a concept known as ‘die mauer im kopf’ – ‘the wall in the mind’. As well as testing images of walls in the focus groups, Wylie’s work at Cambridge Analytica also saw him considering the relevance of research conducted around the lasting psychological effects of the Berlin Wall – which fell 30 years ago this year.
What it indicated was, whether or not Trump actually built a wall, he merely needed to erect one in people’s minds. For walls, as well as being physical barriers, are psychological separators; tools to be constructed in people’s psyches.
In 1989, Germans and the West celebrated the fall of the Iron Curtain. Today, walls are making a comeback. And it’s the building of them in our heads that we need to make ourselves aware of.
A Useful Study
When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, I was three years old. History – or the end of it – didn’t mean much.
Only more recently have I delved into the frighteningly not-so-distant past of Germany following the end of the Second World War. What I have learnt astounds me.
That Germany, which I have always known to be one country, was divided into two, with diametrically opposed political systems being implemented side-by-side.
I have the Wall in my mind… It’s always in my mind.
Hans-Dieter Robel
That one half of the country, East Germany, was run as a communist police state – the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – by the Soviet Union; while America, Britain and France presided over its Western democratic counterpart – the Federal Republic of Germany.
That a wall, which was built one night around half of its divided capital by the East Germans as an “anti-fascist protective measure” – which people would die trying to cross – ended up falling without a single bullet fired.
It seems completely alien, but it happened. And a number of the philosophical questions raised by the Berlin Wall and Germany’s division are still relevant today – about the type of society in which we want to live, where purpose and meaning comes from, how diverse individuals and communities can live together, and what identity is and why it matters.
In his novel Wall Jumper, Peter Schneider wrote: “It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.” His words coined the concept of ‘the wall in the mind’, which has come to mean the lasting psychological effects of difference after the removal of physical barriers.
While researching culture at Cambridge Analytica, Chris Wylie took note of one study in particular, examining the phenomenon of “mental maps”. Conducted in 2005, it found people tended to overestimate the distance between cities on opposite sides of the former East-West German border, far more greatly than the distance between cities on the same side.
“This trend was strengthened when participants had a negative attitude toward the reunification of Germany,” it stated. “Overestimated distances between both German parts indicate that there still exists a mental gap between East and West – even in young people – 15 years after German reunification.”
The study showed that emotional feelings of distance had translated into a perception of physical distance. That the two could be connected.
In Britain today, Brexit has come to represent – for some – the ultimate psychological and geographical cut-off with Europe, feeding a feeling of British exceptionalism and the supremacy of our great island state.
In Britain today, Brexit has similarly come to represent – for some – the ultimate psychological and geographical cut-off with Europe, feeding a feeling of British exceptionalism and the supremacy of our great island state. Much less discussed is its reflection of an unscrutinised legacy of Empire and a reluctance to examine how and why Britain went around the world creating walls in people’s heads.
During the 2015 refugee crisis, border fences sprung up all over south-eastern Europe, even between EU member states.
But, Angela Merkel took a different approach. The Chancellor, who grew up in the GDR, welcomed almost a million non-EU citizens into Germany. Speaking to students at Harvard University recently, she said that a wall did not take root in her mind.
“Our individual liberties are not givens,” she said. “Democracy is not something we can take for granted. Neither is peace, and neither is prosperity. But, if we break down the walls that hem us in, if we step out into the open and have the courage to e