"Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall:" Lessons from Berlin

Struggling to find my way to Museum Island, I crossed an invisible boundary several times before I noticed the marker, a subtle groove a less than a foot across and about an inch deep in the brickwork at Potsdammer Platz, and a plaque with the simple but freighted engraving:

Across Pottsdammer Street, I could see sections of the wall, concrete barriers little more than twelve feet tall that had stood marking the barrier between the freedom of West Berlin and the oppression of East Berlin, a barrier which, when I was a high-schooler, seemed permanent and near-impermeable, but which collapsed the year after I graduated.

Germans, ordinary people, took down the wall, but left its mark on the landscape as a reminder. In one direction lay the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Brandenburg Gate. In the other you could follow the path of the Wall, as bricks embedded in the sidewalk or the roadway, to the kitsch of Checkpoint Charlie, along the way seeing the surreal spectacle of cars parked half in West Berlin, half in East, or places where a building stood astride the Wall's footprint and the bricks dead-ended, only to resume on the other side. 

 

There’s been a lot of talk about walls lately. Most, of course, surrounds President Trump’s much-longed-for barrier along the border with Mexico. I thought about that wall when I was in Berlin just as I’m thinking about the Berlin Wall now, and about the ultimate futility of walls.

A Mexican wall, we are told, will protect us against the hordes of illegal immigrants who come and sap the economic vitality of the country. It is not my plan to argue that, except to say that I find compelling the evidence that they are net contributors to American society and that, even if they weren't there is a clear moral case for allowing them to stay, especially those coming from countries facing turmoil caused, in large part, by American activities.

Some, when pressed, will bring up the old adage, "Good fences make good neighbors," as if the fact that it is a truism means that it's true. Robert Frost addressed this in his poem "Mending Wall," when he wrote,

              "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

              What I was walling in or walling out,

              And to whom I was like to give offense.

              Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

              That wants it down."

In Berlin, the answer was simple" the Soviet-controlled government of the German Democratic Republic was walling in eastern Germans who wanted to emigrate in search of some dreamt-of liberty and opportunity. Along the southern border of the United States, supporters of the wall want to keep out immigrants who seek the refuge of America for the same reasons. In both cases the answer of whom the builders are like to give offense is the same: each wall represents an offense to the world, to everyone who values liberty and opportunity.

Of course there are differences. Most importantly, the Berlin Wall effectively made East Berlin into a prison, something I don't think is intended by the Mexican Wall. To those walled in, or out, though, the difference may seem purely academic.

But there's also an important similarity, and it comes down to the reason we build walls. Or fences. We build them to demarcate our property, and to defend them from incursion.

Qin Shi Huang, the third-century B.C.E. Chinese emperor who directed the construction of the first Great Wall, ordered defenses against the growing might of the Xiongnu confederation to the north. This was a present threat; within a decade of Qin Shi Huang's death, the Xiongnu almost overthrew the first Han emperor. Of course this raises the question of how effective walls are against invaders. We might also consider France's Maginot Line in this vein. Walls are imposing, but a determined foe can always find a way to circumvent them.

During the second century of the Common Era the Roman emperor Hadrian, and his successor Antoninus Pius had walls built across Great Britain in northern England and Scotland, respectively. Each of these walls was less about defense--the Picts to the north were hardly the existential threat to the Romans that the Xiongnu were to the Chinese--than about displaying imperial power, and its limits, by marking those limits.

However, both of these walls can be construed as being built against an actual enemy. Berlin's wall wasn't built against an enemy, at least not an external one; no one truly threatened to invade the east through Berlin. No one now is threatening to invade the United States, despite the strident warnings of a massive migrant caravan that flared up just before the election and mysteriously vanished just as it ended.

No. The intent of each wall, the actual historical wall and the proposed future wall, is the same: to prevent people from going to a place where they believe they can build a better life for themselves and their families. Supporters can harumph about policy and illegal versus legal immigration, as though the legal is a marker of the moral (the GDR was within its legal rights to keep East Germans within its boundaries) and as though those legal constraints are fixed constants of the universe. 

Laws, though, are made by actual human beings, and they can be unmade as well, or changed for better or worse, just as the laws that prohibited the movement of Germans between the two parts of their country were made and then unmade.

What cannot be made or unmade, though, is the desire of people to move to where their lives will be better, and the will to do so whatever the risk. Indeed, this desire and this will represent everything patriots claim makes America great.

A wall athwart that is a wall doomed to fail. Whatever it is that doesn't love a wall will see to that.