Victims of the Berlin Wall: Political Legitimation and Identity-Building in Cold War Germany

Questions of identity and legitimacy were of fundamental importance to the Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic -- two new and artificial entities carved out of the defeated Third Reich, extensively dependent on their respective Cold War patrons, each claiming the exclusive prerogative to represent the true Germany while challenging its rival's right to exist. Each of these anxious states therefore devoted significant resources to promoting internal identity-building, both positively, by boosting its own credentials, and negatively, by denouncing those of its rival. My proposed book provides a case study of how these processes worked during the last three decades of the Cold War. It focuses on the way in which the two German states made use of violent deaths at the foremost symbol of Europe's political division: the Berlin Wall.

In both countries, the Wall assumed vast significance, not only as a concrete barrier in the heart of the Reich's former capital, but also as a symbol of the virtues of one successor state and the sins of the other. In West Germany, the Wall represented Communist tyranny and evil at its worst, a concrete manifestation of the rhetorical Iron Curtain. In East Germany, it was portrayed as the 'anti-fascist protection rampart', a defensive structure supposedly constructed to ward off imperialist saboteurs from the workers' and peasants' paradise. Both states made extensive use of killings at the Wall to promote their interpretation of the existing realities. Heavily politicized portrayals of particular human tragedies were promulgated through governmental statements, propaganda publications, media reports, commemorative public ceremonies as well as monuments, memorials, and other means. In the West, the task was relatively simple: rousing stories of political martyrdom were easy to propagate when individuals obviously eager to flee were callously shot down and sometimes even left to die in the border strip. East German authorities faced a more difficult challenge, but they, too, drew heavily on particular incidents -- especially the deaths of border guards -- in their propaganda efforts, typically portraying the deceased as the innocent victims of imperialist conspirators. On both sides of the German Cold War confrontation, the Wall and particularly its victims thus became crucial tools in intense propaganda battles aimed at building political legitimacy and collective identity in one country and undermining them in the other.

The proposed book will examine these processes in detail, on the basis of extensive research, particularly in German archival sources. It will be structured as a series of case studies, each chosen to illuminate a particular stage in the development of the identity-building and legitimation battles between the two German states from 1961 to 1989/1990. Each of the eight main chapters will focus on a particular individual or, in some cases, a pair of individuals killed at the Berlin Wall, providing a brief portrait of the persons, reconstructing the events that led to their deaths, and showing how their fates and the resulting public discourses illustrate larger ongoing trends in identity-building and legitimation processes in Cold War Germany. This structure will allow a microhistorical approach -- aimed at giving a face and a voice to the often anonymous Wall victims -- to be combined with a much a broader analytical framework, lending the book both scholarly solidity and broader accessibility.