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Space I

In The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (1997), Brian Ladd characterises the Berlin Wall as an interstice where nothing happens, a division where everything was revealed (pp 7-39).

For Ladd, the most remarkable thing about the Soviet security system was the silence and the openness it created. This empty zone of nothingness was where the East cordoned off the West and secured the Communist regime against invasion from other competing systems. It did this by silencing opposition, clearing out pockets of resistance, and freezing movement. The German Democratic Republic's solution to the seductive lure of the flow of capital was to try to shut it out of the minds of the people. Empty, silent, space...