SOURCE: Saalmann, Dieter. “A Deconstructive Approach to the Berlin Wall: Joyce Carol Oates's ‘Berlin Stories’.” In The Berlin Wall: Representations and Perspectives, edited by Ernst Schürer, Manfred Keune, and Philip Jenkins, pp. 170-80. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

In the following essay, Saalmann explores the symbolism of the Berlin Wall in Oates's “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall.”

Joyce Carol Oates's prose pieces, “Ich bin ein Berliner” and “Our Wall”¹, delve into the perilous ramifications of ideological antinomies, as exemplified by the Berlin Wall. “Ich bin ein Berliner” explores the bifurcation of the German consciousness from a Western perspective. “Our Wall” adopts an Eastern viewpoint. The thematic and semiotic interplay between these putatively antagonistic perspectives engenders the heuristic particularities of Oates's discourse.

The Great Divide functions as the objective symbol of the human psyche rent asunder by dogmatic incompatibility. The specificity of the East-West barrier is elevated...