Divided Berlin and Cold War Aesthetics: Mediating the Wall in Literature and Film

The seeming permanence of the Berlin Wall and the spaces it separated during the Cold War placed unique demands on artistic mediations of the city's material, geopolitical, and social opposition. This article assembles a set of literary and cinematic narratives by Peter Schneider, Thomas Brasch, Helke Sander, and Christa Wolf to examine aesthetic forms as emergent responses to restrictions and enclosures west and east of the Wall. Contributing to scholarship on literature and cinema's interaction with space in the Cold War, my comparative analyses of their works evaluate artistic strategies and narrative techniques as elements of an aesthetic of cognitive mapping. I also highlight the significance of such an aesthetic for the prospects of human beings' orientation in the wake of the Cold War's passage.