On the Cover

With the right light, walls cast long shadows. The wounds which the Wall gouged through Berlin from 1961 to 1989 linger in the social fabric, haunting residents long after the physical structure disappeared from the landscape. If objects have lives—at least metaphorically speaking—they just as surely have afterlives, living on after the destruction of their original physical form in memory and memorials. The Berlin Wall lives through remnants and memorials; in the forgetful memory of the city it once divided, and in the divide between Russia and the West that has not even begun to heal after three decades. How much longer will its shade linger?

Hubert Gajewski/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0