Ritual Borders

Thirty years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell. It encircled only part of the city, dividing it between East and West and serving as a metaphor for the contrasting ideologies of Eastern and Western Europe at the time.

Borders mark where one authority begins and another ends. We mark our borders with laws and signposts and walls. Sometimes, we can’t really see where the border is, but we know generally that over here is one place, and over there is another place. In 1889, 25-year-old journalist Rudyard Kipling was assigned to cover conflicts near the Khyber Pass, one of the few ways through the Hindu Kush and across the border between Afghanistan and what was then British India. Kipling described the pass as “a sword cut through the mountains” because the weather and terrain of the pass kill people. The mountains themselves were this border’s wall. The Pass lies on one of the main routes of the Silk Road that stretches across borders from Shanghai in the East to Spain in the West. In the shadow of that 10-foot-wide pass, Kipling wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet.”

When British India split, the East remained India and Hindu, and the West became Pakistan and Muslim. The two shall never meet—except at the precisely choreographed “Beating Retreat” ceremony that has been performed at the Wagah-Attari border crossing for the last sixty years.

Picture this: a pair of ornate iron gates blocks passage on the road, a white line painted on the pavement between them (just like the floor of the bedroom you shared with your sister when you were eight); the black uniforms of the Pakistani Rangers trimmed in white, and on their heads, a giant black cockscomb rises at least two feet high. On the other side of those gates, Indian Border Security Forces wear khaki. Not to be outdone by the Pakistanis, they also wear giant cockscombs on their heads—in bright orange-red.

It’s the end of the day and time to lower the flags and go home. Drums beat a frantic tempo. On both sides, a master of ceremonies leads a call and response with grandstands packed with hundreds of spectators who wave flags and yell with nationalist fervor. This is a border pep rally. Machine gun-toting, sword-brandishing guards flex their muscles, grimace, and point thumbs down at their cross-border rivals. They march with giant steps and high kicks straight out of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. The guards on the opposite side of the gates are doing the exact same thing—same steps, same thumbs down, same silly walks. The ceremony ends with the lowering of flags and an exaggerated handshake between an Indian guard and his Pakistani counterpart.

Here’s a taste of the Beating Retreat border ritual:

And here’s a longer version. It’s quite a sight.

The Wagah-Attari border has been called the Berlin Wall of Asia. The Berlin Wall was that other place where East was East and West was West, even though “West” only meant a portion of a Western city surrounded on all four sides by East. The Wagah-Attari border may be the most uniquely ritualized one in the world, but the Berlin Wall is the standard by which all other borders are measured.

In the wake of World War II, France, the U.K., the U.S., and the Soviets each were to occupy a portion of Germany and its capital, even though Berlin lay 100 miles inside the Soviet zone of occupation. But in 1948, the Soviets tried to evict the other three allies from Berlin by imposing a land and river blockade. They cut power and stopped distributing food in the western-occupied sections of the city. The West responded with the Berlin Airlift, and the conflict between East and West ramped up.

Borders are arbitrary. They are a line drawn in sand, a mark on a map, a gate across a road. The idea is to keep things separated, to keep the bad guys out and the good guys safe.

A long time ago, on a continent far, far away, Mongol hordes regularly invaded their southern neighbors. The Southerners built a series of walls that were eventually joined into one because they were so tired of the constant invasions by those bad hombres. North is north, and south is south, and never the two shall meet in peace, right? I know this because I was once married to a man who refused to vacation north of the Mason-Dixon line, which, he firmly maintained, cut somewhere between Nashville and Louisville.

Chinese schoolchildren are taught that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space. When one of their astronauts admitted that he couldn’t see the wall despite trying hard with extra-sharp astronaut-caliber eyesight, there was some discussion of rewriting Chinese textbooks. But walls, it seems, are too important to let facts get in the way. Although China’s Great Wall can’t be seen from space, its air pollution can. Some things just don’t respect borders. 

People challenge borders. A matched pair of graves in the Netherlands sit in two cemeteries. The wife was Catholic, and her husband was Protestant, so they could not be buried in the same cemetery. They were laid to rest against the wall that divides the Catholic cemetery from the Protestant one. A stone hand reaches out from the top of each of their tombstones and clasps the hand from the other, defying the wall between them. Walls are made to be breached, and borders are made to be crossed.

Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” starts with the western theft of an eastern horse. The theft was only possible because borders are porous. Under Soviet occupation, it turned out that many inhabitants of the Eastern Bloc preferred living in the West. Berlin’s border was very porous. Defectors found their way to Berlin and from there to the West through one of the 81 crossing points in the city.

After 15 years of defections, the Berlin Wall was built almost overnight in August 1961. Guards now simply shot people trying to cross from East to West. The Brandenburg Gate entered the collective consciousness as a symbol of freedom denied. The wall cut workers off from their jobs, prevented friends from seeing each other, and separated families. East was East and communist and totalitarian, and West was West and capitalist and democratic, and the two could not possibly coexist.

The Berlin Wall was not the first such border. In 1953, as East and West and North and South struggled for dominance in the Cold War, a line was drawn between the Koreas. Despite its name, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, is probably the most heavily militarized border in the world. Like at Checkpoint Charlie, people in the DMZ’s no-man’s-land risk being shot on sight. 

In the 1970s, South Korea discovered four tunnels beneath the DMZ and accused the North of planning an invasion. The North hotly denied it, claiming the tunnels were coal mines. They had even blackened the walls of one tunnel to prove it. Oddly enough, the DMZ welcomes 1.2 million tourists every year, and yes, the tunnels are on the itinerary. Tourists can enter a conference room in a building that sits in both countries just to say they’ve been to the North. And there’s an observatory in the DMZ.

Unlike the Great Wall of China, the dividing line between the Koreas can be seen from space, at least at night when South Korea is as brightly lit as any other first-world country and North Korea is pitch-dark, not unlike a coal mine.

The Berlin Wall attracted tourists, too. In the summer of 1983, I went to Europe with a Eurail pass, a backpack, and a loose cadre of companions. When we arrived in Salzburg it was raining too hard for sightseeing, so a couple of the women in our group boarded a train for Berlin. They somehow got a visa to enter East Berlin. They saw a typical modern city when they got off the train in West Berlin. When they crossed to the other side of the wall, though, dull, brutalist, concrete block architecture greeted them. There were no neon signs or billboards. The people seemed as gray as the buildings. A week later, in Amsterdam, my friend Michelle was still stunned as she described the stark difference between East and West. 

East is East, West is West, North is North, and South is South, but people don’t define themselves by directions on a compass. Borders give a false impression that something significant lies on the other side. Borders sometimes may be more of an idea than a reality.

Hadestown is a relatively new musical on Broadway. It re-tells the myth of Orpheus trying to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. Hades has put Eurydice and other unfortunates to work building a wall. Hades asks them, “Why do we build the wall?” “To keep us free,” they respond. “How does the wall keep us free?” “It keeps out the enemy.” “Who is the enemy?” “The enemy is Poverty.” Hades reminds the builders that the people on the other side of the wall want what the Underworld has: freedom–and a wall. Of course, no one is free to leave the underworld once they arrive.

The inequity of the Berlin Wall was immediately apparent to the West. Two American presidents, 25 years apart, stood before the wall and condemned it. John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963. In 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and spoke directly to the Eastern leaders, saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” 

Two years after Reagan’s speech, in the summer of 1989, reform and revolution spread through the Soviet Union and the satellite states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary. East Germans fled their country in droves. On November 4, 1989, half a million angry protesters filled the streets of East Berlin near the wall. To try to keep the population happy, on November 9th the East German government announced it would allow people to pass through checkpoints if their documents were in order. A journalist asked when the new rules would take effect. The government spokesperson didn’t know, so he said, “Immediately.”

But no one expected that it would just end, especially as it did—within hours. The news was broadcast at 8:00 that evening throughout Berlin. People began amassing at the wall demanding passage. At 10:45, lacking instructions and knowing that the announcement had been made, guards began allowing people through. East Germans swarmed the gates and were greeted jubilantly by West Berliners with flowers and champagne. The West claimed credit for the fall of the wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain that followed.

Saturday, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some citizens of Berlin sent a gift to the people of the United States. They inscribed a 2.7-ton slab of the Berlin Wall with a letter addressed to President Trump, which closed with: “We would like to give you one of the last pieces of the failed Berlin Wall to commemorate the United States’ dedication to building a world without walls.” 

The White House rejected the gift. Apparently, our president doesn’t want a wall after all.

This post was originally a paper presented to the Æsthetic Club on 12 November 2019.

Last Updated on September 21, 2024 by