“Thirty Years After”, what have we (l)earned, what are we revealing/hiding, what can we see? Wittgenstein wrote, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus, 7) – but we can highlight the silence with pictures.
Thirty years after the overexposed fall of the Berlin Wall, and after the “reunification” of Germany and of Europe, post-Wall Europe is shaped by paradoxes. In spite of the overall (apparently) successful integration of East-Central European countries, East-West divergences still structure the landscape to the point that we might even question whether the fall of the Iron Curtain really took place. Don’t we live in post-modern times in which events no longer really take place – except as (dis)simulation?
The “Return to Europe” prompted the “Return to History” – and not only in the East. The outdated Westphalian “software” was reloaded: nation, sovereignty, identity, border – thus “power politics” and for some, tentatively, nostalgia for empire. Brexit perfectly fits this scenario. Hence, not the end of history but the reversibility of history – one perpetuated in other, “retroviral”, forms.
