Constructions of the Berlin Wall:
How Material Culture Is Used
in Psychological Theory
CHRISTINE LEUENBERGER, Cornell University
This article examines how, in the latter part of the twentieth century, the German psychological sciences
used the Berlin Wall to interpret and make sense of the psychological make-up of the German people. It focuses
on how the wall has been invoked by psychiatrists, applied psychologists, and psychotherapists in their writings
at three historical moments: (1) after its initial construction in 1961, (2) immediately after its fall in 1989, and
(3) 10 years after its demise. After the wall was erected, it became an interpretive resource to think about a
divided society, and to make visible, decipherable, and classifiable, the inner life of a people. Shortly after its fall,
it continued to serve as a basis for categorizing human suffering. Ten years later the wall had been rhetorically
transformed into a “mental wall” offering a compelling metaphor for modern Germany’s apparent psychological and cultural divide. The three case studies exemplify how the psychological sciences use material objects, such
as the Berlin Wall, as interpretive resources to reflect on psychological issues, make sense of societal transformations, and create and solve social problems.
One of the most memorable images to flash across television screens at the end of the
1980s was the dismantling of the Berlin Wall that had divided communist East Germany
from capitalist West Germany for decades. The wall, built in 1961, represented one of the
great political, economic, and ideological divides of the twentieth century. It became the landmark that symbolized the Cold War. Many argue that the Berlin Wall also left a lasting impression on the psyche of the German people. Historians have documented the economic and
political impact and meanings of the wall (Mann 1968; Staritz 1996; Strokes 2000; Weizäcker
1985), but how did psychologists make sense of the wall and its psychological effect? This
article explores how the wall—as a material object—is used in psychological theorizing, and
aims to understand these psychological accounts sociologically.
The Berlin Wall provides a salient and powerful example of how material culture intersects with knowledge production in the psychological sciences. Psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and psychotherapists have invoked the Berlin Wall in their writings in order to define
and categorize problems psychologically and thereby “make up” peoples’ psychological constituents (Hacking 1986b). Sherry Turkle (1995) calls material objects that are used to make
sense of psychological issues “evocative objects.” These can summon and embody particular
meanings that span social, symbolic and material realms. Such meanings are not inherent to
the object, but are discursively produced by different social groups or scientific communities.
They are “evoked” as a way to develop and assimilate ideas and catalyze changes in how phenomena are perceived (Holstein and Gubrium 2000a; Levi-Strauss 1962). By treating the
wall as a socially meaningful object (Harre 2002), psychologists can invoke it rhetorically to
The author wishes to thank Heike Bernhardt, Greg Eghigian, Trevor Pinch and various interviewees for discussions
that inspired this article. She is also indebted to Michael Lynch, Harry Collins, James Holstein, Trudy Flores, and Amy
Wharton as well as anonymous reviewers for their editorial advice, careful readings, and helpful comments. Direct correspondence to: Christine Leuenberger, Cornell University, Department of Science & Technology Studies, 301 Rockefeller
Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601. E-mail: [email protected].
Social Problems, Vol. 53, Issue 1, pp. 18–37, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533.
© 2006 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
illuminate particular issues and narratively produce psychological and social problems. The
central concern of this article is how psychologists use “concrete” material objects, such as the
Berlin Wall, as sense-making resources to define disorders and construct widely perceived
psychological properties, symptoms and troubles in particular ways at different times (Hacking 1986a, 1986b).1
Analytical Groundings
Studies in the sociology of knowledge and culture have shown how society, knowledge,
and institutions together produce “reality” (and its associated “problems” and “meanings”) as
seemingly relevant, self-evident, and inevitable (Baudrillard 2000; Bourdieu 2000; Cohen 1980;
Durkheim 1947; Emerson and Messinger 1977; Fiske 1987; Glassner 1999; Mannheim 1936;
Schütz and Luckmann 1973, 1989; Stallings 1990). Once constructed, a social reality becomes
naturalized and is taken to be beyond human volition (Berger and Luckmann 1984; Schütz
and Luckmann 1973, 1989). According to the sociology of knowledge, a predominant social
reality also informs and sustains psychological models that make sense of human behavior
(Berger 1965, 1970; Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1974; Berger and Luckmann 1984; see also
Douglas 1986; Mills 1977).
While the sociology of knowledge provides the theoretical tools to understand the social
construction of psychological knowledge claims, there have been few empirical studies of
psychology and its object of study (Leuenberger 2002; McLaughlin 1998). Such empirical
studies have mainly fallen within the domain of medical sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science (Conrad and Potter 2000; Eaton 2001; Gilman 1988; Goldstein 1987; Hacking 1995; Micale 1990, 1995; Scott 1990). Notably, Ian Hacking (2000), although not
explicitly a social constructivist, made similar claims about psychological reality and social
institutions being co-produced. For instance, he has examined how forms of mental illness
can be produced within the confines of what he calls an “ecological niche,” by showing how
the rise of popular tourism, medical politics, and legal jurisdictions provided the niche from
which the medical category of the “hysterical fugue” could arise—the compulsive traveler of
the nineteenth century (Hacking 1998). In this way, cultural prerogatives circumscribe and
reify a new illness or problem, one that becomes plausible only after it is socially conceived.
Although such studies point to the social embeddedness of psychological constructs, few of
them deal with how material objects are taken up in the psychological sciences.
There is a long tradition in sociology and anthropology that examines how people draw
on material objects in the mundane and scientific realms to make sense of their surrounding
world. In one way or another, these studies demonstrate how people use material objects as
meaning-making devices. For example, Emile Durkheim (1947) shows how objects, such as
pebbles, stones and the sun can become integrated into certain belief systems. Claude LeviStrauss (1962) studied folk classification systems built from objects found in the material
world. Economic sociologists and cultural studies scholars deal with how material things,
ranging from consumer items to lifestyle accessories, can embody an array of social meanings
(Carruthers and Babb 2000; Schor and Holt 2000; Smith 1989; Zelizer 1994; also Baudrillard
2000; Bourdieu 2000; Du Gay et al. 1997; Firth 1973; Hall 1990; Lury 1996; Sanders 1988;
Storey 1997). James Holstein and Jaber Gubrium (2000a) argue that material objects act much
like literary metaphors: They can be used as devices to illuminate, understand, and formulate
one thing in terms of another. Material objects can, by transferring meanings between different
interpretive realms, help facilitate thinking and reflecting about aspects of everyday life.
Within science and technology studies, too, the relationship between material objects,
individuals, and scientific communities has garnered attention (Knorr Cetina 1997; Pickering
1. Unless otherwise specified, the terms “psychological professionals” or “psychologists” are used as umbrella
terms that include applied and clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts.
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1995; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Various studies have shown the co-construction of objects
and scientific statements, how human cognitive activities can be embedded in objects and
technological systems, and the social and political construction of artifacts and technological
systems (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987; Hutchins 1995; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Pinch
and Trocco 2002; Winner 1985; see also Ihde 2003). Terms such as “boundary object” and
“liminal entities” have been used to designate the transformative power of objects and artifacts (Star and Griesemer 1989; and Pinch and Trocco 2002, respectively). These can transport,
transpose, and transfer meanings between different social worlds—and may transform these
worlds in the process (Pinch and Trocco 2002).
One of the few studies on how the human sciences use objects as sense-making tools and
how the latter play a role in the theory and practice of psychology is Sherry Turkle’s research
on how computers enter the social and psychological life of their users (Turkle 1995).2 Turkle
shows how cognitively based theories, such as psychology, can draw on material artifacts as
evocative objects. For example, the computer is an evocative object that has changed how
psychologists theorize the brain3
Needless to say, psychologists have long used objects, physical structures, and technological
systems as resources in their theorizing. Psychoanalysts have pointed to the symbolic power of
such objects as snakes, phalluses, and couches (Freud 1965; Gay 1988; Greenberg and Mitchell 1983; Jung 1964, 1972; Winnicott 1986). In the nineteenth century, the newly built railway system in the United Kingdom, led psychiatrists to speak of “railway phobia” and “railway
neuroses” (Harrington 1994:16; see also Schivelbusch 1977). More recently, psychologists
have discussed the symbolic meanings embedded in New York City’s Twin Towers—in both
the edifice and in its 2001 destruction—and how those meanings relate to the psychologies of
the American people and their enemies (Bedi 2004; Ross 2004; see also Hankiss 2004; Wallenstein 2004). Psychologists have also reflected on the psychological implications of the wall
separating Palestinian territory from Israeli territory in the Middle East. In this case, the name
itself is part of the contention—it being referred to differently depending on political convictions—as either the “Apartheid Wall,” the “Separation Barrier,” the “Israeli Wall,” or the “Security Fence.”4 All of these examples show how material culture, whether in the form of railways,
couches, or walls, can inform the production of knowledge in the psychological sciences.
This study focuses on the Berlin Wall as an evocative object in German psychological discourse and as its use as an object to write “psychologically” about political divisions, social
experiences, and personal sufferings. In order to improve understanding of how the wall has
been used to construct psychological symptoms and troubles, I will place the wall in historical
context, after which I will describe the data and analytic methods used as well as the three
subsequently introduced, empirical case studies illustrating that use.5
A Brief History of the Berlin Wall
Remnants of the Berlin Wall have become German national monuments imbued with
symbolic meanings. Unlike most national monuments that are symbols of national pride—
2. Other noteworthy studies that speak to the salience of physical objects include Michel Foucault’s (2000) work
on Jeremy Bentham’s architectural design of an annular building, the panopticon. He argued that it provides a way to
understand social control and conformity in modern society. Ralph Harrington (1994) investigated how psychiatrists
theorized about the psychological consequences of the newly built railway system in the nineteenth century (see also
Schivelbusch 1977).
3. Don Ihde (2003) has recently called for an expansion of the hermeneutic analysis of textual and material
knowledge production to the humanities. By taking into account the “instruments—technologies—by which things can
show themselves” giving them “voices where there had been silence” and bringing “to sight that which was invisible”
(p. 1) a whole new research area opens up in the humanities (p. 8).
4. Palestinian Counseling Center 2004; Long 2003; International Women’s Peace Service 2004; see also Jabr 2004.
5. All translations in this paper were provided by the author.
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
witness the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty—the Berlin Wall has become a symbol of
national oppression.
The wall has come to reflect much of Europe’s modern political history. During its existence it was the emblem of the Cold War, separating two different social, political and economic systems. East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), represented a socialist
experiment in a utopian and “good” society (Parsons 1996). West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), embodied an economic and political commitment to capitalism and
democracy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of a separate East German socialist
state and the subsequent global dissemination of capitalist forms of production and governance
(Staritz 1996). Many commentators took the demise of the Berlin Wall as “an opportunity to
proclaim the ‘triumph of capitalism’ and/or the ‘death of socialism’” (Fulbrook 1992:4).
The GDR built the Berlin Wall with the hope of stabilizing political and economic conditions in East Germany. In the post-World War II period, Soviet and Allied occupation forces
disagreed over the status of Germany. Should it be a neutral, peaceful, democratic state or
should it become part of Western or Eastern military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw
Pact? By 1952 this lack of agreement had led to a temporary and still permeable demarcation
line between the Soviet and the Western-occupied territories, consisting of a restricted area of
five kilometers that could only be entered by special permit (Staritz 1996).
The August 1961 decision to fortify this demarcation was based on a number of economic and political factors. The Cold War had recently intensified with new foreign policy
crises in Korea, Laos, and Cuba (Staritz 1996:88). These crises hindered negotiations between
the Soviets and the Western allies over the status of Berlin. At the same time the East German government was facing an increasingly dissatisfied population, both economically and
politically. West Germany had rebuilt and modernized production facilities under the Marshall Plan, and had increased economic productivity as a result. Compared to that, the East
Germans lagged behind in standards of living and spending power. In addition, the government’s inconsistent and intermittently applied measures to collectivize private enterprise and
crack down on ideological dissidents were producing widespread dissent. As a result, the flow
of migrants from East to West increased: 330,000 people emigrated between January 1960
and the end of July 1961, adding to the approximately 2 million who had moved westward
over the preceding ten years (Staritz 1996:192–94). East Germany was losing economic revenues along with its workforce. The Socialist Unity Party accused Bonn, then the seat of the
West German government, of “agitation” to destabilize the East and of conducting an “economic war” against the GDR (Staritz 1996:185, 191). Consequently, the party encouraged
economic relations with the Soviet bloc and, at the same time, ordered that the borders with
West Germany be sealed.
In the middle of the night on August 13, 1961, East German soldiers started to build the
wall separating East and West Berlin. In East German parlance the border was the “Antifaschistischer Schutzwall” (anti-fascist protection bulwark), supposedly protecting socialist East
Germany from fascist and capitalist infiltration (Staritz 1996:195). To the rest of the world, it
was known as the Berlin Wall.
Its construction marked the beginning of an ever-expanding East German security apparatus. At first, the wall consisted of barbed wire, blocked-off streets, and walled-up windows
and houses. However, it was continually reinforced, and by 1971 it comprised a concrete wall
across Berlin and the hinterland, with electric fences, watchtowers, bunkers, metal fences,
armored roadblocks, and automatic firing ranges (Hildebrant 2001:39). It was, according to a
GDR military general, “the best border security system in the world” (Hildebrandt 2001:6).
Despite its seeming impermeability, during its existence, over 40,000 people tried to cross illegally, and 957 died while attempting to do so (Hildebrandt 2001:6, 75).6
6. The border guards themselves suggested expansions of the security apparatus of the wall in order to dissuade
people from crossing and, hence, being shot. When the border consisted only of a wall or a fence there was little option
then for the border guards to open fire and shoot people attempting to cross.
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On November 9, 1989 the border was opened unexpectedly. Communist countries from
the Soviet Union to Hungary had increasingly adopted liberalized political and economic policies and the East German government was under pressure to follow suit. By the fall of 1989
there were regular political protests in Leipzig and Berlin, and droves of East Germans packed
cars and trains to the Czech Republic and Hungary, which had already opened their borders
to the West. On November the ninth, the central committee of the communist party met to
discuss, among other items, new regulations permitting East German citizens to obtain travel
visas for Western countries. These “provisional regulations” (Staritz 1996:381) were to be
made public the following day. East Germany’s political leader Egon Krenz asked Günther
Schabowski, a member of the party’s central committee who had not attended the meeting,
to mention the new travel regulations at a press conference that evening. When quizzed by a
journalist as to when the new rules would come into effect, Schabowski hesitated and said
“immediately!”(Staritz 1996:381). There was a run on the border. Thousands of people
crowded the checkpoints, and, after stamping a few passports, the overwhelmed guards simply opened the barriers. By midnight all border crossings within Berlin—and an hour later, all
checkpoints to West Germany—were open (Staritz 1996).
Now tourist attractions, only small stretches of the Berlin Wall remain. One multicolored
panel of the original wall is displayed on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, adorned with hearts and
names of lovers. Tourist buses pass by one of the last remaining sections on nearby Niederkirchnerstrasse. Pieces are exhibited in Berlin’s Wall Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, and bits
of the wall (or look-alikes) are sold at Berlin’s numerous flea markets. These bits and pieces
of gray concrete have become mementos of Europe’s political history in the twentieth century, the human suffering it entailed, and the eventual triumph of liberation.
Despite its physical demolition, the wall still stands as an important and culturally available evocative object that is used to depict psychological troubles. Indeed, since its construction, psychological professionals have figuratively built the Berlin Wall into the very structure
of the German psyche.
Studying the Berlin Wall as an Evocative Object
This research is part of a longitudinal sociological research project into psychological and
psychotherapeutic practices and theories in East Germany before and after the transition
from state socialism in 1989 (Leuenberger 2000, 2001, 2002). The focus here is on psychological treatises written about the newly built wall, its fall, and its aftermath. Analytical methods
drawn from discourse analysis provide insights into the structure, sequence, and content of
the texts. These data are supplemented with in-depth interviews and archival material. Multiple interviews conducted with psychological professionals from East and West Germany
between 1990 and 2003 explore changes in participants’ personal, social, and professional
circumstances since 1989. Additionally, archival sources from the GDR’s Ministry of Health,
and from the Society for Medical Psychotherapy of the GDR (Gesellschaft für ärztliche Psychotherapie der DDR) aided in the assessment of the institutional, political and social context
affecting psychological practice and theory in the GDR.
The analysis proceeds through three empirical case studies. The first examines the book
Die Berliner Mauerkrankheit (The Berlin wall disease) written by a prominent East German
psychiatrist, Dietfried Müller-Hegemann (1973), shortly after the building of the Berlin Wall
in 1961 (but not published until after his emigration to the West). Müller-Hegemann drew on
his collection of patient histories to highlight the deleterious social and psychological consequences of a society encircled by the wall. He investigated what Berliners had already started
to talk about—whether the newly built wall was causing a novel psychological disease: “the
wall disorder.”
After the dismantling of the wall and East Germany’s transition from a socialist to a capi-
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
talist economy in 1989, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts provided numerous
accounts of the unfolding events (e.g., Hinrichs 1990; Maaz 1991; Möller 1990; Moser 1992;
Rauschenbach 1992; Simon 1995; Wirth 1995). The second case study examines one of the
best-known accounts of this societal transformation: Hans-Joachim Maaz’s 1990 book Der
Gefühlsstau: Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Emotional Blockage: A psychological profile of the
GDR). In this work, he assessed the psychological consequences of socialism, the transition to
capitalism, and the impact of the wall on the psychological make-up of East Germans. The
wall is said to hold explanatory power to illuminate the “pathologies” of East Germans.
Despite its demise, in post-1989, unified Germany, clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts maintained that the wall reappeared as “die Mauer in den Köpfen” or “the wall in the
heads” of the German people. The third case study draws on a collection of essays stemming
from a congress of applied psychology Deutsch-deutsche Vergleiche: Psychologische Untersuchungen
10 Jahre nach dem Mauerfall (German-German comparisons: psychological investigations 10
years after the fall of the wall) (Berth and Brähler 1999), as well as a study carried out and
published under the auspices of the International Erich-Fromm-Society, Die Charaktermauer
(the character wall) (Internationale Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft 1995). In both accounts,
applied psychologists and psychoanalysts define and elaborate on an array of social and psychological wall-induced differences between East and West Germany.
To analyze the above texts, I coded all instances where the wall was mentioned, then
focused on how the authors of the various treatises discursively constructed the wall as psychologically meaningful and as constitutive of particular social malaises. Diseases have long
been used to comment on the state of society (Rosenberg 1992). These case studies reveal
how material objects such as the Berlin Wall can be used to define social problems and help
categorize psychological ills.
Case Study 1: Building the Wall and the Rise of
“Wall Disorder”
Immediately after the Berlin Wall was built, psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts the world over theorized about its psychological meanings. For the well-known Swiss
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1964), the “Iron Curtain” between East and West
meant the world had been “dissociated like a neurotic” (p. 85). For the eminent British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott (1986), the Berlin Wall signified a full-scale human “manicdepressive psychosis” (p. 227). He argued that the Western allies and the Soviet Union postponed their unresolved conflicts by acknowledging that “if there is no wall there is war” (Winnicott 1986:227). For East German psychiatrist Dietfried Müller-Hegemann the Berlin Wall
became an imminent social reality that had purportedly manifested itself in the psychological
aliments of his patients.
In his book Die Berliner Mauerkrankheit (The Berlin wall disease) Dietfried Müller-Hegemann (1973) pointed out that East Germans were prohibited from mentioning the term
“wall.”7 As mentioned already, the preferred term was the “anti-fascist protection bulwark”
(Müller-Hegemann 1973:11; Staritz 1996:196). But the presence of the wall was, nevertheless, a dominating feature. Berliners, in particular, who lived in close proximity to the wall
7. Müller-Hegemann chaired the neurological clinic at the University of Leipzig from 1952 to1964, before accepting the directorship of Berlin’s Wilhelm-Griesinger-Krankenhaus, one of the largest psychiatry and neurology clinics in
East Berlin. In 1964, unhappy about what he described as the “refuge-like conditions” in the hospital, he entered into a
controversial debate with the GDR’s Ministry for Health (Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde DQ1-6676a; Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde DQ1-6676b). After his retirement, he failed to return after a trip to West Germany, and in 1972 he was Visiting
Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), when he wrote Die Berliner Mauerkrankheit (1973). He later returned
to West Germany, where he continued to practice psychiatry. For additional biographical detail on Müller-Hegemann
see Bernhardt 2000; also see Universität Leipzig 2003.
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were purported to be most directly affected by its construction (Geuter and Huber 1980). It is
they, who, after realizing that the wall was here to stay, started to whisper about the “wall
disorder” (Mauerkrankheit) befalling the Berlin population (Geuter and Huber 1980:42).
As with other disease categories, it was the ones afflicted, who first used the term “wall disorder” before Müller-Hegemann adopted it as a professional category (Jaspers 1965; MüllerHegemann 1973).8
Müller-Hegemann maintained that the “wall disorder” did not consist of a clearly defined
disease process, as would be the case for an organic disease; rather it was a “syndrome” that
was caused by the newly built wall and could lead to various deleterious psychological consequences (Müller-Hegemann 1973:9). For instance, the feeling of “being locked up,” in addition
to wall-induced separation and social isolation from friends and family, could produce various
psychological disorders such as psychosis and schizophrenia and behavioral problems, including
alcoholism, depression, anger, despondency, dejection, and suicide (Müller-Hegemann 1973:42;
see also Geuter and Huber 1980).
Given the prevailing political circumstances in East Germany at the time, Müller-Hegemann
pointed out that he could not systematically study the wall’s psychological consequences
because this would have led to his immediate arrest and prosecution. Nevertheless, he noted,
secretly and intermittently, how, in his opinion, the wall had become a “social pathology” for
many of his patients who were suffering from various psychiatric and physical conditions
(Müller-Hegemann 1973:10).
In his book, Müller-Hegemann discussed various clinical cases of people who apparently
suffered from wall disorder. A typical case is the story of an East German woman “E. S.” E. S.
was referred to the psychotherapeutic unit of the Leipziger’s university neurological clinic in
1962 suffering from a locked jaw that had persisted several weeks after the removal of an
infected wisdom tooth. The referring physician determined that the locked jaw was “organically inexplicable” (Müller-Hegemann 1973:13).
Upon her admittance to the psychotherapeutic unit, attending clinicians noticed her
“extreme psychological excitability and despondency” (Müller-Hegemann 1973:13). The case
history revealed that E. S. had an uneventful childhood and was widowed before remarrying
a West German in 1961. She lived with her husband in the West and regularly crossed the
East-West demarcation line until one day in August 1961. That day, after returning to the
East German city of Leipzig to dispose of her household belongings, she attempted to buy a
railway ticket back to West Germany. She was informed that as a GDR citizen, she was no
longer allowed to travel there. Numerous attempts to return to her husband proved fruitless,
and she was forced to live and take a job in the East. In the summer of 1962 she developed a
locked jaw. She entered psychotherapy at this point and became suicidal in October 1962.
After a six-week stay at the clinic, her attending clinicians urged the district physician to let
her go back to her husband in the West. At the clinicians’ urging, she was allowed to travel
west to rejoin him.
Müller-Hegemann concluded that this case history was unique in the clinic’s history.
Before the wall was built, political circumstances might have triggered depression in some
patients. However, he argued that E. S. exemplified how the wall situation could become
the “main factor for the disorder,” revealing the wall’s full “pathological meaning” (MüllerHegemann 1973:15). In the case of E. S., the wall situation produced a “helplessness and
desperation” that led to a “reactive depression” (p. 16) so severe that it might have proved
fatal. According to Müller-Hegemann, E. S.’s wall disorder resulted from the construction of
the wall and directly affected her life circumstances. Later, other patients were similarly
affected by the wall-situation. They consisted mainly of people who lived in Berlin or near
the German-German border installations. Müller-Hegemann’s rhetoric of psychological problems,
8. Müller-Hegemann (1973) mentioned other disease categories that arose from everyday parlance including
“barbed wire syndrome” in the First World War and “concentration camp syndrome” in the Second World War.
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
thus, appropriated the material wall as a resource for assigning causes to psychological
maladies.
Besides cases in which the wall was said to have interfered directly with people’s personal and professional relationships, the following story from Müller-Hegemann’s case notes
shows how a patient could be portrayed as suffering indirectly from wall disorder. In this
case, the disorder came about as a result of an encounter with collaborators from the Ministerium
für Staatssicherheit (state security ministry), or secret service, also referred to as the “Stasi.”
Following the construction of the wall, the secret service’s influence and activities increased
as part of an ideological crackdown. The Stasi could recruit ordinary citizens to become informants, particularly communist party members. While the state presumed that citizens who
declined to collaborate with the Stasi were politically suspect, those who collaborated could
expect various professional advantages in return for their cooperation. But, those who
agreed, “could hardly expect to be released again” from their role as informants because they
knew “too much” (Müller-Hegemann 1973:35).
Patient “M. S.” had worked as a civil servant and was a member of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (SED), the Communist Party, when secret service agents requested
some initially benign information about his friends and colleagues. At first he agreed, but as the
agents’ visits became more frequent and the pressure to provide sensitive information, more
insistent, he declined to cooperate any longer. However, M. S. was told that he was, in effect
already an informant, and as a party member, he was obliged to provide the information. The
Stasi asked him to become a permanent informer and after further pressure, he reluctantly
complied.
Consequently, the Stasi required M. S. to inform them about his personal and professional networks. He was also instructed to terminate certain relationships. After disregarding
this order, he became convinced he was being spied upon and that his apartment was being
searched, so he eventually ended relationships, as requested. Subsequently, M. S. became
increasingly depressive, delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic, and suicidal.
After an intensive course of clinical treatment, M. S. was released. His collaboration with
the Stasi, now officially over, he nevertheless, forcibly entered the Soviet embassy, claiming
he was being followed and spied on by the Stasi. Thereafter, he was involuntarily confined.
Müller-Hegemann (1973) concluded that M. S. suffered from “typical delusional perceptions
within a systematizised delusion” (p. 37) that had probably progressed into a “reactive psychosis” and “schizophrenia” (p. 38). Ultimately, M. S. was released after many months of treatment but without “full insight into the delusional aspect of his thought processes” (p. 37).
According to Müller-Hegemann (1973), the case of M. S. demonstrated how “completely
comprehensible feelings of depression as a result of forced isolation and a probably justified
suspicion of being spied on” can progress to “a psychotic delusion” (p. 37). He argued that
this case demonstrated how the ideological pressure, in which the Stasi engaged after the
Berlin Wall was built, could eventually result in wall-induced pathologies.
The above cases are just two of numerous instances of what Müller-Hegemann described
as “wall disorder,” the symptoms of which could vary in kind and severity, ranging from
despondency to schizophrenia. Within Müller-Hegemann’s discourse of psychopathology, the
wall was said to directly influence some patients’ lives. For them, the physical wall was
thought to cause various mental disorders. Others, it was argued, felt its effects more diffusely
(here Müller-Hegemann cites patients whose apartments adjoined the wall or who experienced ideological pressures at work). For those patients, it was the wall’s inherent ideological
meanings and the social divisions and institutions it created that could facilitate the development of psychological problems. Müller-Hegemann acknowledged that the wall situation
would only cause fully-fledged pathologies when combined with an individual’s constitutional weakness. The resulting psychological debilities also had the inadvertent effect of reinforcing the ideological pressure to submit to the will of the state.
Müller-Hegemann maintained that, over time, as people became accustomed to the wall,
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acute symptoms such as schizophrenia, psychoses, and phobias diminished. After the 1970s,
growing economic and political cooperation between the two German states, the result of
“Ostpolitik,” as propagated by West Germany’s social democratic chancellor Willy Brandt,
meant that the wall became more permeable (Fulbrook 1992; Staritz 1996). This, he argued,
alleviated some of the more acute symptoms of “wall disorder” (Geuter and Huber 1980:43).
From Müller-Hegemann’s perspective on these patients’ conditions, the wall itself had
become the main cause of their psychological problems. In psychological discourse, the wall
not only embodied a physical barrier, but also came to stand for political repression, social
conflicts, and personal sufferings. Viewed sociologically, however, we can see that the wall as
a material object was used evocatively and metaphorically to characterize a range of elusive
and disparate experiences. It became a rhetorically powerful sense-making device that rendered these experiences comprehensible.
Charles Rosenberg (1992) points out that diseases can provide ways to “frame debates
about society” (p. xxii). Medical and behavioral scientists can use incidences and etiologies of
disease to gauge social ills that speak to the “perceived gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought to
be,’” (p. xxii). This gap can provide a rationale for social action and inform social policies and
reforms. For Müller-Hegemann, the entanglement of people’s psychological and social experiences with the wall became a means to assess the social problems of a walled-in existence in
post 1961 East Germany. He predicted that depression, despondency, and a high suicide rate
would persist as long as the wall existed. Combining the discourse of disease with the material metaphor of the wall provided a way of framing a wide range of personal, social, and
political problems and their solutions. The wall could be used, not only as a resource to diagnose social ills, but also as a means to propose their remedy: the abandonment of the wall as
a project of political liberation.
By the time Müller-Hegemann wrote and published his book, he had emigrated to the
West. His personal circumstances (having left the GDR voluntarily, partly due to professional
disagreements with the Ministry of Health) as well as the wider political situation meant his new
disease category did not become part of the standard lexicon of East German psychiatric theory
or practice. However, the category of the “wall disorder” stands as a reminder of how the
material wall can be constructed as psychologically meaningful to people’s lives and experiences.
Ian Hacking (1998) points out that the infrastructure and knowledge of a society and its
medical professions can provide a cultural niche that helps define categories of illness, disease
and disorders (see also Heelas and Lock 1981; Helman 2000; Romanucci-Ross, Moerman,
and Tancredi 1997; Scott 1990). The Berlin Wall was part of an infrastructure that was appropriated into the psychological diagnostic vocabulary. The categories of this vocabulary offer
plausible ways to make sense of people’s psychology as they elaborate on available psychological knowledge and speak to relevant social circumstances. In this instance, the political,
legal, and social implications of a walled-in existence provided the niche that brought
together and made visible an array of problems that could be plausibly captured by the psychological category of “the wall disorder.”
Case Study 2: Storying the Berlin Wall as Part of East Germans’
Psychological Make-Up
“Wahnsinn” (mind blowing) was the word for the night of November 9, 1989. The border
was open. Gateways were smashed through the wall. By November 14, twenty-two new
crossing points had appeared, and through these gaps poured tens of thousands of people.
Champagne corks popped, people climbed onto the wall, and “wall-peckers” chiseled away
its foundation (Staritz 1996). The wall was to become a memento of a bygone era.
However, psychologists and psychoanalysts maintained that the wall remained embedded in people’s psychological make-up. Immediately after 1989 East German psychotherapist
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
Hans Joachim Maaz was a highly visible and vocal cultural critic, noted for his psychological
treatises on the transition from state socialism (Maaz 1990, 1991). He was sought-after by the
media and published prolifically for lay and professional journals. For him, the transition provided an opportunity to psychoanalyze East German society, culture, and politics. He used
the Berlin Wall as an evocative object that revealed people’s unconscious and denoted various psychological problems, ranging from repression to denial and projection. Within psychoanalytic theory, such psychic processes crucially constitute neurotic and pathological behavior
(see also Hinrichs 1990).
The use of psychoanalytic concepts by an East German psychotherapist was, at the time,
particularly significant because, under the socialist health care system, psychoanalytic theory
was scorned as ideological, bourgeois, elitist and incompatible with the socialist sciences
(Bernhardt and Lockot 2000; Leuenberger 2001, 2002). In contrast, within the West German
health care system, psychoanalytic approaches had long been institutionalized. The statutory
health insurance began reimbursing depth-psychological treatments in 1967. Maaz’s analysis
is, therefore, recognizable as an attempt to adopt psychological concepts associated with dominant West German therapeutic approaches.9
In his book Der Gefühlsstau (Emotional Blockage), Maaz (1990) described that fateful
night in November 1989 as a psychological revolution: “The wall’s fall was the emotional climax of the unloading, the cathartic breaking-through . . . of the unconscious. The emotional
blockage unclogged, the repressed came to the surface, and the parts that had been split
apart, united” (p. 152). East Germans’ “emotional blockage” had built up over years of a
“walled in and restricted existence” marked by “authoritarian” structures in schools, homes and
professions (Maaz 1990:15). He argued that “the wall provided the outer framework” for East
Germany’s “repressive and authoritarian” (p. 15) political, medical, and educational institutions and practices. Consequently, East Germans were an alienated, emotionally split, sterile,
inhibited, and compulsive people. The demise of the wall and the “emotional liberation” that
followed now provided an opportunity to make visible and to treat the “social pathologies”
(p. 124) from which people were thought to suffer (see also Leuenberger 2001, 2002).
For Maaz (1990), the wall and the division it brought about also meant Germans could
project everything wicked, evil, and spiteful onto the other German state. Indeed, “the division [of Germany] provided from its beginning a great chance for suppression . . . Introspection was successfully hampered and old [psychological] mechanisms fostered denial and
projection” (p. 174). Most notably, for East and West Germans, the dark legacy of their common past—fascism—was always cast as the problem of the “other Germany.” For West Germans the FRG was a de-Nazified and democratized country, whereas they alleged that the
legacy of fascism and authoritarianism had seeped into the GDR’s political and institutional
structures. For East Germans, on the other hand, the West Germans were the unenlightened
ones who were fascist to their cores (see also Staritz 1996:70). The wall could be used rhetorically to reconfigure a “common, incriminating past and repressed introspection” (Maaz
1990:182).
Besides affecting society at large, Maaz (1990) also understood the wall as consequential
for people’s personal lives. For instance, it determined the experiences of refugees from the
9. Given that the West German health care system and its professional stipulations were being transferred to the
East, such psychoanalytic accounts can be understood as a form of “identity politics” (Leuenberger 2001:271) as they
constituted an attempt to maintain professional legitimacy within a changing system of professions (Abbott 1988).
Arguably, such psychological accounting practices had the “manifest” function of attempting to sustain professional
credibility (Parsons 1964). By conceptualizing East Germany’s formerly socialist society and collectivist ideals in terms of
psychoanalytic approaches in which individuation, autonomy, and independence are taken to constitute mental health,
these accounts also had a “latent” function (Kirschner 1996; Parsons 1964; Rose 1992, 1997). By pointing to socialism as
the cause of psychological problems East Germans’ psychology seemed wanting and in need of renewal (Leuenberger
2000). This inadvertently justified the demolition of the socialist system in favor of the wholesale adoption of West Germany’s societal arrangements.
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GDR who settled in the West. Many were forced to cut off contact with family and friends in
the GDR. They “slammed the door to the past” (Maaz 1990:132). Having failed to understand
these problems at the time, they later struggled to come to terms with the wall’s demise, and
the lacuna opening up between their past and present that it represented. The destruction of
the wall thus served to “unite” to “heal and make whole” all that was split off, dejected,
repressed, and projected onto its other side (Maaz 1990:152, 159).
Maaz’s analysis, much like Müller-Hegemann’s account, treated the wall as a psychologically significant phenomenon that commented on the state of East German society. Maaz
used the wall to conjure up various psychological properties; it became a tool for writing
about the psychological make-up of individuals and of East German socialism (see also Hinrichs 1990; Meyer 1997; Moeller and Maaz 1993; Möller 1990; Schröder 1990; Seidler and
Fröse 1993). Maaz (1990) maintained that the wall was implicated in people’s tendency
towards “emotional repression,” and its fall, in their “emotional liberation.” He used images
of the wall to portray East Germans’ “dysfunctional” character. It served to project undesirable traits onto the “other Germany” and enabled refugees to escape family and friends. In
Maaz’s text, the wall’s very existence was used to embody the “unresolved legacy” of National
Socialism. Moreover, it was used discursively to constitute and describe authoritarian and
repressive social structures.
Maaz, thus, invoked the Berlin Wall as a culturally available metaphor for “storying” the
psychological properties of self and society in transition (Holstein 1992). He employed the
wall, once again, to evoke various social ills that point toward what “is” and what “ought to
be” (Rosenberg 1992). While for Müller-Hegemann the wall had to be abandoned before East
Germans’ psychological health could be restored, for Maaz, the psychology of a walled-in
existence had to be overcome and worked through psychologically. This, he argued, was the
prerequisite if East Germans were to become healthy, normal, and productive citizens who
were unburdened by their pasts.
Maaz’s accounts helped reinforce dominant cultural stereotypes of the dysfunctionality
of East German socialism and its subjects.10 Psychological analyses such as this one, that
seemingly reified the different psychological and social realities of the two Germanys, might
also have unintentionally paved the way for what was to become the defining metaphor for
inter-German relations after 1989—the mental wall. After the transition from state socialism,
it was the mental wall that marked what were seen as essential socio-cultural, psychological,
linguistic, and political differences between East and West. It was a metaphor that came to
define and dominate the East-West divide.
Case Study 3: The Mental Wall
By the time the wall seemingly reappeared as “die Mauer in den Köpfen” (the wall in the
heads), its concrete structure had been demolished. Its vestiges were museum remnants.
Nevertheless, journalists as well as psychologists maintained that the wall was still present.
This time it was no longer a physical barrier separating East Germany from West. Neither did
it mark geopolitical divisions between communism and capitalism; rather, the new wall was
portrayed as a mental one.
10. Maaz’s treatises (1990, 1991) on the psychological profile of the East German nation brought him notoriety in
the early 1990s. In interviews I conducted with him in 1997 he mentioned that inadvertently, and much to his dismay,
readers could use his observations to justify dismissing and discrediting East Germany’s professional institutions and cultural heritage. In subsequent works (e.g., Moeller and Maaz 1993) he critiqued capitalist West Germany and, what he
perceived as the professional colonization of East Germany by the West. He also became a proponent for East German
psychotherapeutic approaches to be recognized by formerly West-German professional societies and health insurance
schemes (Maaz, Hennig, and Fikentscher 1997). His oppositional stance regarding developments after 1989 provoked
overt criticism from professional colleagues.
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
“Die Mauer in den Köpfen” was a “worthwhile invention” says journalist Monika Maron
(1999) “after the real wall had crumbled.” Nobody knows where the term “the wall in the
head” came from. Maybe a savvy journalist coined the term, or perhaps it arose in everyday
parlance as early as 1990, when the former communist party (renamed as Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, or PDS) continued to receive a lot of votes in the East (Berth and
Brähler 1999; Wätzig 2002). Whatever its origin, it captured the cultural, linguistic and political gap that had opened up between East and West. The term could suddenly be heard and
read everywhere, explaining what seemed to be incomprehensible and reprehensible: why
the two German cultures had failed to become one (Andresen 1999; Broder 1999; Christiansen 2001; Der Spiegel 2000; “Die Mauer fällt 1989” 2003; Glaser 1999; Köcher 2003;
Reiche 2003; Wätzig 2002; Weiss 1999). The wall was again depicted as insurmountable,
unavoidable, and almost natural (Maron 1999).
Opinions polls conducted in the 1990s found that “every 8th German wishes for the wall
to be back” as the mental rifts “between East and West are deeper than ever” (Berth and
Brähler 1999:28, 42, 95). A recent poll confirmed that even in 2005, the wall, and “the divide
it represented remains firmly lodged in German minds” (Beaumont 2005). The metaphor of
the “mental wall” to describe the continued “social distance” (Berth and Brähler 1999:165)
between East and West was also taken up by psychologists. Analyzing the persistence of the “wall
in the head” became the aim of psychological studies presented at the twentieth congress of
applied psychology in 1999 in Deutsch-deutsche Vergleiche: Psychologische Untersuchungen 10 Jahre
nach dem Mauerfall (German-German comparisons: psychological investigations 10 years after
the fall of the wall; Berth and Brähler 1999; see also Berufsverband Deutscher Psychologinnen
und Psychologen 1999). The various treatises investigated differences in character, identity,
health awareness, intelligence, and moral consciousness between East and West Germans.
Some explored why Germans would wish the Berlin Wall to be reinstated, and the collection
pointed to various “objective” as well as “subjective” factors reinforcing the mental wall
(Schmitt, Maes, and Seiler 1999:173).
“Objective” factors include economic disparities that, according to clinical psychologists,
reinforced the mental wall between East and West (Maes, Schmitt, and Seiler 1999:28).
Indeed it is only upon “the convergence of living conditions [between East and West] that the
wall in the heads would fall” (Berth and Brähler 1999:173).
But as of 1999, many East Germans still reported feeling “degraded” by job losses and
compulsory retraining programs and humiliated by their lack of competence, knowledge,
and experience when faced with new laws, unfamiliar tax return forms, healthcare plans, and
consumer culture (Schmitt, Maes, and Seiler 1999:162). East Germans’ “subjective” perceptions
of themselves as “second class citizens” also “hampers the inner unification [of Germany]
and is surely an important cause for the wall in the heads” (Berth and Brähler 1999:162).
The mental wall has also been used to signify a range of psychological and cultural differences (Brähler and Richter 1999). Psychologists have observed that East Germans pride
themselves on their extensive and intimate social networks, hence differentiating themselves
from the “socially distant, egocentric and unempathetic” West Germans (Brähler and Richter
1999:25). Wagner (1999) points to cultural differences between East and West Germans.
While East Germans are moralistic, idealistic, and egalitarian, West Germans are described
as hedonistic, individualistic, and americanized (Wagner 1999:67–68). Such differences in
norms, values, and lifestyles all serve to reinforce the mental wall.
In these treatises, the wall is no longer portrayed as a cause of various psychological disorders, as Müller-Hegemann (1973) described. Nor is it implicated in the “dysfunctional”
character Maaz saw among the East German people (1990, 1991). Rather they (Berth and
Brähler 1999; see also International Erich-Fromm-Society 1995) show how the Berlin wall
has become a culturally available metaphor to evoke a range of social and psychological differences between East and West Germans. The wall is used to demark, characterize, and categorize people according to various traits and divide them into clearly defined social groups of
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“Easties” (Ossis) and “Westies” (Wessis). This may inadvertently reinforce perceptions of
social, cultural, and psychological differences across the East-West divide.11
Indeed numerous psychological studies have focused on racist and authoritarian attitudes across the East-West divide (Berth and Brähler 1999; Berth et al. 1999). In Die Charaktermauer (the character wall), the International Erich-Fromm-Society (1995) reported on a
study of authoritarian tendencies in thirty East and West German schoolteachers. The
study investigated whether East and West Germans possessed psychological traits that constituted a “character-wall.” The authors assumed that, unlike in the West, for East Germans,
the “authoritarian character-orientation was structurally predetermined in most people”
(International Erich-Fromm-Society 1995:250). However, they were surprised that interviewees revealed seemingly inconsistent, mixed, and unexpected traits. They concluded that
both East and West German teachers displayed authoritarian tendencies, but East Germans
somewhat more so.12 As a result, “Germans in East and West are not separated by a characterwall, in the sense that there is a structurally solidified psychological barrier to an inner unification and assimilation” (International Erich-Fromm-Society 1995:267). Thus, given that their
findings suggest that East and West Germans share more character dispositions in common than
expected, the authors wanted to withhold their judgments as to whether there will be a “permanent character wall between East and West” (International Erich-Fromm-Society 1995:270).
In such studies of characterological and psychological differences, the mental wall
became a means by which to create a story about unification in terms of two easily discernible social groups in East and West. The complex stories of how different social groups had
crossed the East-West divide and had resisted, conformed with, or advanced certain agendas
were often submerged. Instead, the image of a wall-induced divide served as a convenient
tool to attach, reinforce, or annihilate psychological discrepancies as well as similarities.
Such psychological treatises of the mental wall thereby helped define and uphold separate national and individual identities. In turn, the wall became a resource for reflecting on
the politically forged German national identity that was embodied in the Christian Democratic Union’s (the German conservative party or CDU’s) 1990 political slogan, “Wir sind ein
Volk” (We are one people) (Brähler and Richter 1999; Schmitt, Maes, and Seiler 1999). Psychologists and social critics thus continued to invoke the wall as an evocative object to help
make sense of German society.
The Wall as a Narrative Object
Since its construction in 1961, psychiatrists, applied psychologists, and psychoanalysts
have used the Berlin Wall to construct various narratives that speak to the psychology of
11. The concept of the mental wall has also seeped into German public discourse. Beyond describing the apparent
psychological disparities between East and West Germans (Mahlitz 2002; Pressedienst FU Berlin 1999) “die Mauer in
den Köpfen” has become a way to address various issues from opposition to the war in Iraq in 2003 (Anker 2003), to
xenophobia (Pressemitteilung Migrationsstudie 2002), to the culture of nudity (see Niehenke 2003), and to understanding the Greek-Turkish divide in Cyprus (see Heinemann 2003).
12. The International Erich-Fromm-Society (1995) conducted a psychoanalytically informed study of thirty German primary school teachers (fifteen from East Germany and fifteen from West Germany) during the immediate posttransition phase in 1991 and 1992. Based on interview data, interviewees were categorized into what Erich Fromm had
earlier delineated as dominant character types: authoritarian, hoarding, narcissistic, market-oriented (opportunistic),
necrophile (destructive) and productive (see the International Erich-Fromm-Society 1995 for detailed definitions). Of
the fifteen East German teachers, twelve were found to be of an authoritarian character type (with the remaining three
being classified as hoarding, narcissistic, and productive, respectively). Of the West Germans, four were classified as displaying authoritarian dispositions while, of the remaining interviewees, five were categorized as “simple narcissistic,”
four as “marketing-oriented,” one as “hoarding,” and one as “necrophile.” Somewhat surprised by these results, the
International Erich-Fromm-Society (1995) concluded that West Germans were more authoritarian and less productive
than expected, while East Germans were less conformist and more productive than anticipated.
The Berlin Wall in Psychological Theory
individuals, society, and culture. In post-1961, socialist East Germany, Müller-Hegemann
(1973) thought the wall facilitated and caused various disorders, ranging from despondency
to depression and psychosis. After 1989, Hans-Joachim Maaz (1990, 1991) proposed that the
wall was indicative of East Germany’s “pathological” social system and affected people’s psychological make-up in various ways. After the Berlin Wall had long become a museum piece,
applied psychologists and psychoanalysts maintained that it survives in people’s heads (Berth
and Brähler 1999). This mental wall is used to specify various psychological, moral, political,
and cultural differences between East and West (Berth and Brähler 1999; Internationale
Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft 1995). In such psychological treatises, the wall remains a powerful
metaphor that helps define, categorize, and inadvertently sustain certain psychological, social,
and cultural problems.
The Berlin Wall thus exemplifies how people can narrate with objects. Using images of
material reality, psychologists can define and create meanings that span the social and material world and illuminate social phenomena of interest. Creating order and seeing “what goes
together” (Levi-Strauss 1962:9; see also Berger and Luckmann 1984; Durkheim 1947; Turkle
1995) has always blended material and symbolic realms (Bowker and Star 1999). Durkheim
(1947), for instance, shows that Aboriginal religious mythology classifies pebbles, humans,
and God together in terms of their sacred qualities. A material object thereby becomes entwined
with the social world as it turns into a “powerful projective medium” (Turkle 1995:13) that
reflects larger social concerns and circumstances.13
The psychological significance of the Berlin Wall changed along with wider transformations throughout German society. The modification came about as psychologists used the
wall, at different times, as a resource to either identify psychological traits or categorize various psychological symptoms and disorders, and also to provide a vivid and familiar way to
visualize social and cultural differences. The wall’s meanings were neither stable nor fixed.
Rather, its psychological interpretations were always transitory, often multiple, and frequently contradictory. These psychological accounts speak less to the wall’s inherent properties than to the ways it could be made to be situationally meaningful within certain culturally
available discourses (see also Bijker et al. 1987; Derrida 1998; Foucault 1973, 1994; Gordon
1980; Hacking 1998; Harre 2002; Rose 1992; Saussure 1965).
The history and sociology of the human sciences suggest that psychological problems and
disease categories such as the “hysterical fugue,” “attention deficit disorder” (ADD), “post
traumatic stress disorder,” “stress,” “hysteria,” “borderline personality disorder,” and “schizophrenia” are often transient (Conrad and Potter 2000; Eaton 2001; Gilman 1988; Goldstein
1987; Hacking 1995; Micale 1990, 1995; Scott 1990). Once in place, however, they can produce an epidemiological trend. People then start to see the problems they expect to see in categorical terms. Categories, in turn, serve as a means by which individuals can be made visible,
understandable, and treatable.
Throughout its history, the Berlin Wall provided a cultural resource and a niche psychologists could use to define relevant problems as psychologically meaningful—visible, understandable, and treatable. It became a means to classify people as suffering from wall disorder
in the 1960s, from emotional repression in 1989, or from cultural dislocation in the 1990s. At
all times, it provided a discursive framework in which it made sense to feel aggrieved, emotionally stultified, or culturally distinct and alienated from others. For psychologists, the Berlin Wall could be used to circumscribe people’s psychological make-up and delineate how
they could legitimately feel at any particular time and place.
13. How the various psychological accounts relate to predominant political circumstances remains to be investigated. While Müller-Hegemann’s account (1973) could provide a potentially critical counter-narrative to the political
rationale for building the Berlin Wall, Maaz’s work (1991) was understood as supporting dominant cultural stereotypes
of dysfunctional East German socialists. Treatises on the mental wall (Berth and Brähler 1999), on the other hand, could
become a resource for opposing the politically forged unification of the two Germanys. Arguably such different psychological treatises could be understood at times as supportive of, as well as divergent from, political aims.
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Evocative Objects and Social Problems
Sociological studies employing a constructionist perspective propose that social problems
do not self-evidently and inevitably arise as part of particular circumstances, but rather, are
constituted through active claims-making (Best 1995; Cohen 1980; Glassner 1999; Holstein
and Gubrium 2000a, 2003; Holstein and Miller 1993; Spector and Kitsuse 1977; Stallings
1990). Issues that turn into grave concerns result from claims-making. Claims-making, in
turn, draws on various social, institutional, and interactive resources. Niches emerge that
make these problems seem relevant and pertinent. For instance, in order for a disease category to be entered into the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, claims-makers (in this case a community of practitioners) need credible epidemiological
links that fit within the dominant scientific consensus. They also need to be well organized
and possess moral zeal as well as political and institutional alliances (see Abbott 1988;
Bowker and Star 1999; Scott 1990; Scull 1975).
Claims-makers also routinely call upon human, material, and cultural objects to embody
those conditions they seek to identify as problems. Reality claims are thus materially and culturally mediated (Gubrium and Holstein 1997; Holstein and Gubrium 2000a, 2000b, 2003).
Terms such as “battered woman” or “welfare mother” are used as generic personifications of
public problems (Loseke 1992; and Davis and Abramovitz 1992, respectively). Sometimes
specific persons have come to represent social problems. For instance, Matthew Shepard
came to signify hate crime (Jenness and Grattet 2001) and Rodney King, racially motivated
police violence (Jacobs 2000). Inanimate objects, too, are powerful tools. The “burning bed,”
the “razor blade in the apple,” and the “Barbie doll” have been used widely to evoke powerful images of domestic violence, child endangerment, and gender role socialization as social
problems (McNulty 1980; Best and Horiuchi 1985; and Messner 2000, respectively; see also
Berns 2004; Townsley 2001). These objects now stand as the virtual embodiment of the problems they ostensibly exemplify. Just as the Berlin Wall was commandeered as a model for the
troubled German psyche, material objects, such as “Columbine High School,” can be mobilized
to induce powerful images of social ills, creating the contours of widely recognized social problems like school violence. Material objects can clearly be used to envisage and categorize social as
well as personal troubles. Evocative objects like the “Barbie doll,” “Columbine High School,” and
the “Berlin Wall” are among the most useful resources in the claims-making tool-kit.
The uses of the Berlin Wall that are described in this article may very well adumbrate a
new way of understanding the troubles that are unfolding in the contemporary Middle East.
There, another wall is being built to separate Palestinian from Israeli territory. Like the Berlin
Wall, this wall consists of fences, razor wires, trenches and barriers. Just as there were competing rationales for erecting the Berlin Wall, this new wall is also portrayed as either a
repressive measure that encroaches on Palestinian territory or as a security barrier necessary
to protect Israeli civilians. Psychologists have already begun to reflect on this wall’s potential
psychological effects (see e.g., Palestinian Counseling Center 2004). The wall’s impact on
people’s mobility, livelihood, and social networks is said to have deleterious social and psychological consequences. The story of the Berlin Wall has much to tell us about how barriers
can be discursively built into the fundamental psychological and social structures of divided
communities with physical walls in their midst.
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