Re: [xmca] Berlin Wall "poetry"

[David Preiss <ddpreiss@me.com>]

Hi Greg,

Yes. This is, indeed, laughable and a mass media inspired perversion  
of a historical moment. And, surprisingly staged, for what supposedly  
was, according to these days reporting, a spontaneous situation. Who  
know how spontaneous it really was. Maybe we will know 50 years from  
now.

Still, it does not make the DDR less oppressive of what it was. Check  
this contemporary artistic re-enacment:

http://www.stasi-live-haft.de/en/index.php

Certainly, it makes me think of Guantanamo and their unknown secret  
analogues.

Thanks for sharing!

David


On Nov 10, 2009, at 6:15 PM, Gregory Allan Thompson wrote:

> Colleagues,
> I am gravely disappointed* that no one noted the most
> eloquent** statement from the time of the tearing down of the
> Berlin Wall -- David Hasselhoff's singing of his now classic
> "Looking for Freedom".
>
> Check it out at:
>
> http://blogs.trb.com/entertainment/technology/watchthis/2009/11/berlin_wall_20th_anniversary_d.html
>
> If nothing else, the battery powered lighted leather jacket
> makes the time spent watching worth it (this particular video
> clip also points to a delicious moment in which someone from
> the audience hurls something at Hasselhoff - I guess that
> someone wasn't "looking for freedom").
>
> Just yesterday I was teaching Marx's German Ideology and the
> notion that the ideal of "freedom" might be an ideologically
> loaded one, that is, it is a "ruling idea" and which serves
> the "ruling class" in capitalism (and which can be opposed to
> other ruling ideas in other times, such as the notion of
> "honor" during feudal times). In a strange way, this clip
> seemed to bring home this point in a way that words never could.
>
> Check it out.
>
> -greg
> *To be read in the most ironic tone possible.
> **ditto
> ---------------------------------------
> Greg Thompson
> Ph.D. Candidate
> The Department of Comparative Human Development
> The University of Chicago
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David Preiss
ddpreiss@me.com
http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/

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