for tribal protection eventually become curious relics, even tourist attractions. Think of the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall against the “barbarians” and medieval European city walls. Consider the Maginot Line—some 200 miles of fortifications built by France—a failed attempt to stop Hitler’s invasion. And the Ringstrasse now serves as Vienna’s hub, encircling its old city where protective walls stood until they were deemed obsolete. Austrian-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef replaced the ramparts with broad boulevards; the city grew and prospered (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).
Walls serve as stereotypical backdrops for executions—both in real life and cartoons: the condemned are literally up against the wall. A drawing by Dan Reilly for the New Yorker magazine is a prime example of the firing squad wall used for a joke. The victim is tied up and blindfolded as the officer in charge tells him, “I’m sorry, we’ve had to drop the traditional last cigarette, on account of complaints from the firing squad about secondhand smoke.” Franz Joseph’s younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, sailed to America from the security of his walled Miramare Castle redoubt in Trieste and declared himself Emperor of Mexico. Mexicans decided otherwise and a firing squad executed him up against a wall, a finale memorialized in a series of captivating Manet paintings.
Perishable Walls
After extraordinarily heavy rains in Tuscany, a 65-foot section of the San Gimignano city wall—built some 800 years ago—collapsed. A few days later I met with the town’s mayor.
“In the Middle Ages,” Giacomo Bassi told me when we met in his city hall office, “walls could have a real function. Without them there was death and destruction.” The city walls provided protection. “But walls built today,” he said, “have another meaning. Exclusion.”
It’s a message President Reagan understood when he pointed at the Berlin Wall and preached, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” I lived in Berlin when it was divided, when East German soldiers armed with rifles and shoot-to-kill orders cordoned off West Berlin. And I returned to join the throngs that chipped away at the concrete after the wall was breached—pieces of it I brought back to America remain in my office as reminders. Today a few preserved lengths of the wall lure busloads of the curious, visitors anxious to understand how the divided city coped. I listened as a smiling tour guide enthusiastically informed his clients, “Here you can actually see a part of the Berlin Wall!” And while the tourists took their selfies it was easy to imagine how even today’s harshest fortifications will eventually devolve into educational delights complete with nearby ice cream and T-shirt stands.
Tuscany’s graceful old walls, alive with flowers blooming between stones, now shade visitors at gelaterias and osterias, upscale leatherwork shops and haute couture outlets. Repairing the wall damage was Mayor Bassi’s priority when we talked. Visitors to San Gimignano’s walls fuel the little city’s economy. “We are going back in history,” Mayor Bassi said, worried about the worldwide resurgence of obstacles. “We no longer need walls.” Travelers and migrants, he insisted, should be free to cross borders. It’s an appropriate attitude for an official whose city lies on a pilgrimage route from England to Rome.
Yet we are living at a time when a new generation of walls separates us. The Hungarian border fence along its line at Serbia, created to stop refugee traffic from Syria and Afghanistan. The Israeli underground wall, designed to prevent tunneling under the wall that already exists on its 40-mile border with Gaza. The Indian wall of barbed wire along its border with Bangladesh, strung to keep out unwanted migrants. Morocco’s sand and land mine wall against incursions from Western Sahara. The ugly concrete wall in Lima, Peru, built by a wealthy neighborhood fearful of the poor folks from across the street (pocked with doors to allow maids and cooks and gardeners access to their jobs on the rich side). The list is long and global. The Canadian border with the Lower 48, touted as the longest international border in the world free of a military defense, is hardened with police, various types of bulwarks and mandated formal border crossing points where official documents must be shown by cross-border travelers—even those who live in villages that straddle the border with no physical barrier face a conceptual wall delineated by signposted warnings that they must cross their own town only at official control points.
Walls Surround Us
Some walls are metaphoric and transcend a physical barrier. After the Berlin Wall came down Berliners on both sides of the destroyed barrier noted the “wall in the head” because of the east-west cultural divide that developed during the years the city was separated, a divide that did not disappear with end of the wall. We create walls of silence when we socially shun others. We build invisible walls based on our expectations of personal space in crowds or when we meet others. In some cultures, at least prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, friends and acquaintances kiss their hellos and are almost lip-to-lip in conversations, while in others folks maintain a judicious distance when talking and rarely touch each other unless their relationships are intimate.
Venice is a walled city, walled off by nature: water. The Grand Canal and its tributaries protected its Roman settlers from the marauding Attila the Hun. Other walls we build in our relentless attempt to control nature. The seawall at the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, for example—a failed barrier designed to hold back tsunamis. The Netherlands and Singapore hope seawalls keep rising waters from inundating their cities. Nature again reminds us who is boss with walls of flames such as the devastating fire in my home California county of Sonoma, fire walls that destroyed thousands of homes in just one deadly night. Surly homeowners create spite fences, walls of trees and bushes planted to block the views of neighbors they dislike. The paranoid and worried among us build walls around themselves, living in gated communities where the houses are equipped with panic rooms—hardened interior walls—in case those gates fail.
Walls can be art. On the west side of divided Berlin—where access to the wall was not restricted by the well-armed guards, ferocious guard dogs and automated machine guns of East Germany—the concrete barrier became a miles-long canvas for painters, the politics of control a common theme. Likewise, the Palestinian side of the West Bank barrier built by Israel is fabulously graffitied by Banksy—particularly arresting is his “Girl Frisking a Soldier” imagery. Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy created his long, meandering stone wall installation in upstate New York countryside. Graffitists and muralists find opportunities for their work on urban walls worldwide. Decorated sound walls muffle highway noise. Phil Spector produced his Wall of Sound to back up singers with his trademark cacophony and the Grateful Dead built the group’s wall of sound, the massive array of amplifiers and speakers the band required to blast its music to huge crowds of fans. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” offers an operatic ode to desperation. Libraries and bookshops
