In November 1989 one of the most politically potent borders in the world—the once nearly impenetrable Berlin Wall—seemed to vanish in the blink of a historical eye. Chants in the United States in 2016 to “build the Wall” are the symbolic opposite of 1989, when the iconography of a falling Wall epitomized freedom and fellowship. This class uses the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall to explore the Berlin Wall’s legacy for the political practice of walls and walling as it impacts the world today. It combines a close empirical case study of Berlin with a wider examination of walls as a technology, ideology, and lived reality. It approaches the Berlin Wall as a simultaneously local, national, and global issue that captured the political imagination far beyond Germany, and looks at how it actually functioned, how it was experienced, represented, and appropriated, and how it continues to circulate in the global imaginary. We will examine how the Wall’s shadow nurtured Cold War fears, fantasies and frictions, served as the site of drama, death, and escape, shaped West Berlin’s infamous art and music scene, and how it reappears today as a site of a different kind of politics of commemoration, gentrification, and identity. Students will pursue individual research projects either on the Berlin Wall or on a contemporary case of walls and walling of their choice, for example the US-Mexico border, Israel/Palestine, the Koreas, Belfast, or Cyprus. Readings are drawn from scholarly writing, ethnographies, reportage, fiction, film, and popular culture, plus websites and films.