reflections

As we predicted, the development shown in this timeline did not end in reality in 2005. In all the areas involved in the modernization of nationalism continuities were miraculously, as a matter of course, reinforced and deepened.
As far as can be foreseen this “wonder” will get its final polish in 2009 with the symbolic staging of the wall fall – 20 years after. In addition it will be the 60th jubilee of the founding of the FRG. The GDR too - but noone wants to remember that.

In the football world championship year 2006 not only the made-in-Germany nationalists were waving their flags and products, but also the black-red-gold stripes balconies, and has since become an everyday car decoration.
The image campaign “Germany, Land of Ideas” installed giant
high-gloss sculptures in Berlin’s city space, extolling the achievements in culture, research, and economy, and offering a positively connoted identity.
The stage set Berlin, in the consciousness of historic responsibility, seems to be recodeable. Like on Bebel square, where history is covered over with a stack of books to give the place where german students burned books in 1933, a positive reading. Similarly, right next door, the former city palace, out of a more innocent
era, will be reconstructed with the method of “selective unbuilding”.

2007, the year of the holy fence, started a new phase of carrying responsibility, because Germany took over the EU presidency, and didn’t shy away from hosting a further world event. The G8 in Heiligendamm not only served as an excuse for reclusion behind a transparent fence, but also for expanding the definition of terrorism, the deployment of the military inside the country borders, and an aggravated, paranoid surveillance.
Following the factual elimination of asylum rights in 1993, the german citizens’ test became a prerequisite, and the debate on integration of foreigners became more authentically german.
At the EU-level Germany forced through their deportation prisons and policies, modernizing racializing laws and institutions.

Berlin is arming itself for the wall fall commemoration. Expanding upon the events and formulations of the commemoration
year 2005 , Germany will try to present itself as victims of history, and simultaneously as creators of the peaceful revolution.
In 2009 Berlin, the “city of change”, will memorialize the victims of a divided Germany with great emotion.
A designation of the Shoa as the reason for the division will be ignored and repressed. A comparison of the GDR with National-Socialism as the 2nd German dictatorship implicates a relativization and, at the same time, serves to play down the Holocaust.

As an image for the symbiotic fixation, which was very apparent in the “You Are Germany” campaign of 2005, domino blocks will be toppled on the 9th of November as a wall metaphor.The “Wonder of Bern” will be followed up by the“Wonder of Berlin”. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?