Word: walls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wall In My Head” is by no means an indictment of communism. On the contrary, several of the stories and essays seem to almost pine for its simplicity and order. One of the finest essays in the collection, “Farewell to the Queue,” by Vladimir Sorokin, uses queues as a metaphor for the togetherness and order of Soviet society—a “quasi-surrogate for church,” which taught obedience while giving people time to ponder the advantages of socialism. In his view, the market economy replaced order...
Finally, the collection confronts the issue suggested by its title—the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Berlin Wall itself is best introduced in an excerpt from “The Wall Jumper” by Peter Schneider, a one-time student activist in 1960s Berlin. Against expectations, the wall is not presented as some overbearing, malignant force. Schneider instead tells the story of two boys who routinely jumped the wall in order to see films only available on the Western side, before returning home to the East (and even refusing, on one occasion, a direct offer...
Mostly, “The Wall in My Head” is about communism and the people who lived under it—not when it collapsed under its own weight, but when it threatened to become the world’s dominant form of government. The authors of the anthology, as disparate in their ideologies as in their backgrounds, reach no conclusions. They make few grand claims about communism as a system of government. To some extent, the lack of some overarching statement or idea is frustrating, but it simultaneously feels just. Instead of prescribing a specific view...
...provides an answer to the question “Where from?” Without this answer, he believes, the people of Eastern Europe will be unable to answer another question: “Where to?” For citizens of post-Soviet states, “The Wall in My Head” provides a new avenue for understanding their past...
...addition to being a legendary Wall Street figure, Bruce Wasserstein was also a dedicated and valued member of the Harvard Community and a wonderful example of the far reaching impact Harvard Business School alumni have made in the business world and beyond,” wrote Jay O. Light, dean of the Business School, in an e-mailed statement...