In the mid-1990s, I was in Berlin for the first time looking for the Berlin Wall. I remember walking around the Reichstag marveling how its façade was still gutted by artillery fire almost fifty years after the Second World War ended and only a few years after the momentous events of 1989. I remember learning how the Soviets had left post-war East Berlin in tatters as a humiliating reminder and punishment for the German people. What I remember most however was looking for the Wall and failing to find it where it had once stood. I had seen it in films and photos and heard stories about it. Like millions across the globe, I had watched ecstatic Germans of all sides gleefully ram sledgehammers into its graffitied sides and scale its exposed wires to reach the once perilous ledge that stood between two worlds. Stopping on the spot where I was told the Wall once stood, I was astounded to find not even the smallest marker. Meandering east and west, I came across biscotti-sized pieces of what was allegedly “the Wall” being sold for only a few marks in local tourist traps. I remember walking away feeling duped. Where had the Wall gone? What modern gang of tomb raiders had stolen it? The Wall was a part of me too, I thought, and I wanted a piece of it.
In his ambitious new novel, The Berlin Wall – released thirty-five years after the Wall saw its last sunrise intact – David Leo Rice plumbs the depths of a dark secret that looms at the core of Europe’s collective consciousness: an unspoken nostalgia for the Berlin Wall and the time that it defined. A time that in retrospect can feel more grounded than our own, when people and countries fit into easy categories, national behaviors were mapped, and the course of events was secured by a shared understanding of mutually assured destruction. The unnerving détente of the time can even feel reassuring when compared to our current state of volatility and chaos where it seems that at any moment just about anything can happen and often does.
In the novel’s opening pages, the lines on the map have shifted and what was once a shared understanding of the world no longer carries any weight. We’ve entered the new paradigm, defined by mysterious forces morphing Europe’s coastlines into an impenetrable border. This geospatial event may give renewed meaning to the oft-heard accusation that Europe is a fortress intent on keeping “unwanted outsiders” at bay – expanding the symbolic reach of the Berlin Wall to all of Europe. From the outset, however, it’s impossible to determine if these accounts of morphing borders are true or exaggerations or a new breed of fake news. It’s tempting to view these reported events as the not-so-farfetched tale of a forthcoming climate apocalypse or as a mise-en-scène of the ongoing migrant crisis. However valid they may be, these interpretations would offer only a surface reading. End-of-times’ revelations aside, what interests Rice is how Europe’s history converges with the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall – which since 1989 has been buried in the collective subconscious of the continent’s peoples. For Rice, curing the ailing patient requires shedding a stark psychoanalytical spotlight on its most hidden pathos. Only in this way can the New Europe emerge. But, as is often the case, the treatment can get ugly.
Psychoanalyzing the nostalgia/desire for the Berlin Wall leads Rice down a labyrinthine path that butts into a sobering conclusion: the Wall marks the spot (in time and space) where Europe’s desire for humanist utopias perished. But if utopias are by essence impossible to realize they are equally impossible to kill; in many ways, they define the modern human journey. Turning individual and collective desire into reality – into utopias – has been a European pastime (voire obsession) at least since the Renaissance. Be it Da Vinci’s sepia sketches of flying machines, Auguste Comte’s irrational positivism, Nietzsche’s intoxicating Übermensch, or Einstein’s promethean desire to split the atom, European consciousness – if one can be identified – has long been in the throes of impossible (often destructive) desires. Arguably, the Berlin Wall is the embodiment of Europe’s most consuming desire for unachievable utopias gone amok, leading to the murder of millions in pursuit of the perfect human society.
Rice however does not seek to expose complex theories. Rather, he explores the fears and desires of the characters who unknowingly suffer from “post-Wall disorder.” Early in the novel, we meet German Chancellor Lena Havermeyer, who believes it is her destiny to put the murderous 20th century behind Germany and open Europe to a prosperous future – a vision she expounds in her May Day speech entitled “The Funeral for the Twentieth Century.” In it, she announces the inauguration of the Future Museum, which will replace the Holocaust Memorial and be dedicated to “peace, prosperity, and the constant, patient search for greater knowledge, greater reason, and greater tolerance.”
But with every word the Chancellor utters, we sense the trauma of the buried Wall deep within her, a trauma that cannot be overcome without a reckoning that has yet to happen. Her dilemma, and that of the continent’s erstwhile intelligentsia, is summed up in the question Wittgenstein, the Chancellor’s doctoral subject, once posed: “What does it mean to say one thing and mean another? In what actual sense does the meaning exist apart from what is said and, if it doesn’t exist, what does it mean to speak of it?” Even as she delivers her speech, she can feel this question undermining her words and her convictions. Is that the future her constituents want? She stares at the crowd uneasily, awaiting a response, when suddenly the spirit of the Soft Illuminati enters the bodies of the thousands gathered in Alexanderplatz in what Rice calls a “flaccid invasion.”
The forces at play in the novel require a bit of explanation. The Soft Illuminati appear to be a gelatinous form of the actual concrete and wires of the Berlin Wall, or the forces that led to its construction, otherwise referred to as the Hard Illuminati. Their gelatinous state allows the Soft Illuminati to take possession of people through a flaccid invasion of their bodies – a sort of body snatching – making them de facto participants in what Rice calls “The Living Wall,” members of which are meant to come together to reconstitute the Berlin Wall. There are also others such as Ute, whose body is composed in part of pieces of the Wall. She has been roaming Europe in search of her true self since 1989. While this vision may seem like fantasy fiction, there are many in the Europe of this novel who believe the Berlin Wall was, and is, an actual living being. And I venture to say that Rice is inviting us to believe this as well.
At the same time the Chancellor is making her speech, alone in his apartment in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, György Kaczor watches the Funeral for the Twentieth Century on his computer where pop-up notifications offer rapid-fire commentary criticizing the Chancellor for failing to mention the Living Wall. György came to Berlin from his native Hungary to study with posthumanist philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, imagining a libertine life awaited him in the heart of Europe. Quickly, however, he finds a sleepwalking consumerist society. The flab around his nineteen-year-old belly is growing as he tries to muster enough will to visit the gym. Easy prey to the AI-generated political candidate Ulli Harz (and his “One Valhalla Party”) as well as nationalist influencer Ragnar of Atlantis, György dreams of a post-1989 Europe where the Wall never came down. For those like him, the Wall is the place where the dream of “Europe” not so much ended but was postponed.
György is an intelligent young man with a promising future. But when he submits a research paper entitled, “The Living Wall Was Real: Notes on the Liberal Suppression of History,” to his professor Anika Schulz, renowned Berlin Wall scholar, she is compelled to intervene one-on-one with György to head off his dangerous trajectory. In her mind, stories of shifting coastlines and the Living Wall are nothing but propaganda, and she warns the young man to steer clear of them. But the seriousness of the matter hits home when Chancellor Havermeyer offers her a generous salary to travel to the Black Forest to “examine the circumstances surrounding [an] altar” built in the name of the Living Wall.
The novel relentlessly offers a strange menagerie of human behaviors. They include the drinking of cement by fanatics eager to assimilate the Wall into their bodies, the ritualistic drowning of stuffed animals and rubber toys by children, and a terrorist attack in the Black Forest, not to mention the Authentication Ritual to determine who in fact has true pieces of the original Wall within them. Most fascinating, however, is the slow regeneration of the Wall in the form of skin that engulfs the characters from below and above. In this narrative, the time of repentance has passed and the specter haunting old Europe has rematerialized and come alive. This specter takes the form of skin bubbling up from below the earth’s surface, blanketing the azure skies from the Ural Mountains to the shores of Brittany, and thickening the blood and flesh of persons whose bodies, like Ute’s, harbor pieces of the Wall. The emergence of this skin midway through the novel is the closest we get to a flesh and blood resurrection of the Wall.
Rice’s novel is an eschatological tragicomedy where desire for and obsession with the Berlin Wall possess all its characters and re-possesses the course of events. Here, there is no end of history; rather, the spirit of history reassumes its dominance as the determinant of the fate and destiny of nations and peoples and, in a Hegelian-Marxist sense, of history itself. The will of the people is only a vector for something bigger than themselves, revealed through a perpetual unfolding. There is no escaping this history where the Living Wall moves through the consciousness of all things and of all individuals like microscopic DNA that weaves its designs at birth and reveals itself when least expected.
This brings us back to the notion that rooting out the infection entrenched in Europe’s subconscious requires psychoanalyzing the source of the trauma. To restore health to Germany and Europe at large, the characters must journey past the myths that have sustained them (and which science has demolished) and return to the locus of the mythical subconscious of the European spirit – the Black Forest in southern Germany. There, in this axis mundi of Europe’s soul, the Berlin Wall has been residing in darkness since its collapse. Now erected on an altar, it is ready to be reconstituted into its true nature – the Living Wall – until a murderous event sends the Living Wall far into the Siberian taiga, perhaps to escape history at last.
Rice’s novel has many layers of narrative and is open to rich and varying interpretations. Below the surface is a metaphorical exploration of Sloterdijk’s concept of ‘spaces of coexistence’ where the notion of ‘being’ in traditional continental philosophy takes on new, expanded meaning. In this sense, the destiny of the soul of Europe – seen through the physical morphing of the continent’s borders and the disappearance of thousands into an unidentifiable abyss – is less a Dantesque purgatory of opposing dualities and more the journey of a consciousness still in the state of becoming.
***
The Berlin Wall
by David Leo Rice
Whiskey(e)y Tit; 400 p.
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