Removing the Monument to Overcoming Walls: Reflections on Contemporary Border Walls and the Politics of De-bordering

by Olivia Mena, London School of Economics and Political Science

On a snowy morning in early March 2013, under the cover of darkness and protection of 250 police officers, construction workers began to take down several segments of the last standing, 1.3-km stretch of the Berlin Wall to make way for luxury high-rise apartments (Birnbaum 2013; The Guardian 2013). Just a week before I had made my first pilgrimage to the remains of the Wall, walking with other tourists along the East Side Gallery, as it’s known, photographing the murals by artists from all over the world that capture the significance, history, and meaning of the Berlin Wall and project alternative visions of a more convivial world without walls. The stretch of cinderblock and the preserved empty dead-zone behind it became the most…