In Gaza Dies Your Western Dream

The dream of the West is written upon a wall. The wall serves to delimit the preserve of its own dreaming. “Behind me is the immortal, the immemorial, West!” is what it might say for itself, if walls could speak. The dream has come to resemble its envoy in some respects: immobile, passive, impermeable. The dream has a heart of stone.

Other walls perform a similar function in the domestic sphere. In the heart of the heart of the space described by four such walls is the hollow that is called a home. “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house,” wrote Gaston Bachelard, “I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

The most forceful period of dreaming occurs in childhood, when these walls and the forms they contain become the template and reference point for all future instances of hearth and home. These early walls of our acquaintance are a repository of intense, mysterious longing, and this phenomenon is hardly confined to the West. “What are the obscure causes that draw a man to his family, his house, his memories, as a spring draws a small flock of mountain goats?” asked Ghassan Kanafani in his short story “Letter from Gaza.” His answer: “I don’t know.”

Whether the wall is fortified or domestic, bearing the dreams of geopolitical entities or individuals, the wall has always remained a wall. It is indifferent to the child even as it fosters its illusions. A child is, strictly speaking, grammatically analogous to a wall, as both are gender-neutral nouns: It (the child) dreams within its (the wall’s) shelter. Metaphors are abundantly projected on both, as each are repositories of potential, but a child is not an object, which is why this usage is uncommon. A profound sorrow in childhood creates, and then intermediates, two distinct mental states, establishing a sort of before and after, a BC and an AD. For a child, such a sorrow is the hidden foundation of an unfinished building. A house without walls.

“A house split in half by a bomb,” Czesław Miłosz wrote of the Polish streetscape during World War II, “the privacy of people’s homes—the family smells, the warmth of the beehive life, the furniture preserving the memory of loves and hatreds—cut open to public view.” The ubiquity of this visual transgression, exemplary in its negation of what was assumed to be the natural order of the world, the safety found in one’s own home, is the very thing, he argued in The Captive Mind, that irrevocably alienated many Eastern Europeans of his generation from what we might call “the dream of the West.”

We are not categorically horrified, however, to see fortified walls ripped open and torn down. Here in Berlin, the destruction of Die Mauer, as it is known in German, is celebrated as a landmark in the city’s history. The East Side Gallery, the longest remaining section of the wall still standing, attracts some three million visitors per year. Its colorful graffiti and murals commemorate the tradition of painting and writing on the wall that flourished in the 1970s after it was refurbished with smooth, prefabricated concrete slabs. A similar tradition now continues on the so-called “separation wall” in the West Bank.

The impromptu, anarchic canvas of the Berlin Wall was celebrated as a symbol of free expression, the dream of the West overwriting the metaphor of its demarcation. Written entries ranged from the political to the personal to the puerile: “SMASH ALL WALLS”; “Ich liebe dich Maria”; “ANALTERROR”; “Anarchie ist die höchste Form der Demokratie”; “Didi was here”; and so on. But freedom of expression was only tolerated to a point. West Berlin authorities scrubbed away all the anti-American and anti-Reagan slogans on it before the president’s 1987 visit to the city, when he famously declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The Hungarian artist Endre Tot arrived in West Berlin in the late 1970s and added his own contribution: “ICH WÜRDE MICH FREUEN, WENN ICH ETWAS AUF DIE ANDERE SEITE DER MAUER SCHRIEBEN DÜRFTE” (I would be glad if I were allowed to write something on the other side of this wall). Tot’s wish has, in a sense, come true. The celebrated history of writing on the Berlin Wall took place on the Kreuzberg-facing side, that is, the side facing West Berlin; the East Side Gallery, initiated in 1990, is on the Friedrichshain side, facing the former East, where there was no such tradition because approaches on this side of the wall were closely guarded, with potentially severe consequences for those who transgressed.

Most tourists are probably unaware that they are visiting the presentation of a historical phenomenon that has, so to speak, been turned inside out. The tradition of palimpsestic writing in West Berlin has disappeared in favor of curated, preserved sentiments from the early 1990s. In fact, what visitors now see when visiting the gallery are not even the original murals commissioned in the 1990s but replicas of them made in 2009. Street art, as it is now known, became one of Berlin’s visual hallmarks post-reunification, and the tradition of writing on walls continues unabated on less symbolic surfaces, especially in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

Preservation is, however, antithetical to writing on walls. Defacement is inherent to graffiti, which is evident in its etymology, ultimately derived (via the Italian graffito) from the Greek verb graphein, meaning both “to scratch” and “to write.” Graffiti is as old as art, and is possibly even its source. The Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï, one of the first modern artists to take a serious interest in graffiti, said of his images documenting the phenomenon, “These concise signs are nothing less than the origin of writing, these animals, monsters, demons, heroes, these phallic gods, no less than the elements of mythology.”

It is in the nature of walls that they say one thing one day, and another thing the next. The statements may be totally contradictory, and yet we cannot call the wall a liar. It is a wall. Not everyone loves what walls have to say, nonetheless. Some would prefer that they stay quiet. Attempts to silence the loquacious walls of Berlin spur millions of euros in economic activity annually. The imperative of this unlikely economic agent: make this wall forget what it just said.

The most profitable and talkative “walls” in Berlin are not necessarily walls. They are advertising spaces belonging to the company Wall GmbH, which has a dominant market position on outdoor advertising in the city. These “walls” are ubiquitous on bus shelters and public toilets, which the company builds and maintains in return for advertising rights. Anyone can make these walls say anything, but it comes at a cost. The company’s founder, Hans Wall, was one of the earliest major supporters of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party.

Walls can, however, say too much. As in the case of outdoor advertising, an excess of stimulation can dull the reception. Where graffiti is ubiquitous, the language of walls becomes part of the cityscape and is absorbed as backdrop, not unlike the monuments to long-forgotten personages that populate many cities. We cease to pay attention and become used to the walls’ blather, no longer recognizing the jarring messages they so often deliver.

If all the walls of the world were utterly effaced of language, the appearance of a single word on a wall would be a sensation inseparable from a manifestation of the Word. If this word was, let us say, LOOK, crowds would undoubtedly gather and follow its imperative in awe. Perhaps it would even become a point of pilgrimage, similar to how Times Square has retained something of its aura as the site of great innovations in the deployment of writing on walls. Tens of millions of visitors arrive at this mecca every year to, essentially, look at advertisements.

Much as the force of this speculative injunction to “look” would carry greater weight in a world scrubbed clean of wall-speak, a single word inside a photograph can likewise change how we look at the image. It gives a fresh charge of meaning to the other elements in the frame. Embedded in the word is a constellation of disparate images and associations that, in tandem with its semantic sense, constitutes its meaning. The word gives something of itself, its embedded images, to the photograph in which it participates; language, in other words, is inherently bound to its own cognitive metaphors. “To think is to speculate with images,” wrote the philosopher Giordano Bruno.

There is an image, for example, by the great Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri in which the word mare (sea) appears on a railing before a sea view. There is the sea, and there is the word for sea, and yet they do not entirely correspond. The word “sea” may make one think of a tangential childhood memory, the scent of suntan lotion, or a different image of a different sea. These associations are the implied image of the word “sea,” and coincide uneasily with the readily apparent image of a sea. So it is that banality and horror can come to meet on a wall in Berlin, which never ceases to be a wall. Distant images of carnage and destruction may be gleaned alongside benign scenes of everyday life.

Watching the liquidation of a different ghetto, Milosz was struck by the proximity of a nearby carnival and its “sky-carousel” just beyond the Warsaw Ghetto’s walls. “Someone will read as moral / that the people of Rome or Warsaw / haggle, laugh, make love / as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres,” he wrote in the poem “Campo dei Fiori,” comparing the scene to the public burning of Giordano Bruno, a method of execution known as a “holocaust.” Someone may think much the same looking at images of Berlin’s residents going about their lives in the presence of the contemporary byword for atrocity, Gaza. “But that day,” as Milosz concludes the stanza, “I thought only / of the loneliness of the dying.”

The walls of Berlin ceaselessly chatter and we have become accustomed to the writing on the wall—even though a wall may say what we would ourselves dare not utter for fear of severe punishment, legal or extralegal. Walls may encourage crude sexual acts or keep the record of a forbidden love or express sentiments which, if said in public—whether on a stage, in a newspaper, or to the wrong person on the street—may lead you to lose your job.

There is a fatal attraction, nonetheless, to the writing on the wall. Something of fate is embedded there. One is said to “ignore the writing on the wall.” Obvious outcomes are depicted, and yet, it seems, we cannot bring ourselves to look at them. Perhaps we can’t even understand what is really written. Such is the lesson of the story from which the phrase “the writing on the wall” originates, Belshazzar’s feast.

As is told in the Book of Daniel, Belshazzar, king of the neo-Babylonian empire, threw a great banquet and drank wine from the silver and gold vessels that his father, Nebuchadnezzar, had taken from the temple in Jerusalem. In the midst of the revelry, Belshazzar notices a disembodied hand writing in an unknown script on the wall of the palace. The wise men of Babylon are brought in but fail to decipher its meaning. Daniel, a Jewish exile in Babylon who had made his fame as an interpreter of dreams, is called in by the queen. Daniel reads the inscription as MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN, and explicates the cryptic message:

MENE—God has numbered [the days of] your kingdom and brought it to an end;

TEKEL—you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting;

PERES—your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians.

Daniel’s method is not explicitly stated, nor is it explained why MENE is repeated, but a common interpretation is that he first reads the words as nouns, all of them monetary weights, and then as verbs with double meanings (PERES being the verb whose root is found in UPHARSIN). That night, Belshazaar is slain, and his kingdom passes to Darius the Mede, as was foretold by the writing on the wall.

The most famous depiction of this scene was rendered by Rembrandt. His writing on the wall was, however, unintentionally altered: the painter mistranscribed one of the Hebrew letters, changing the letter nun in its sofit, or end-of-word, form (ן) in UPHARSIN to the letter zain (ז). Rembrandt’s painting reads MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIZ, this last word now having no meaning. A Hebrew speaker would notice, too, that the script is arranged in columns, not in right-to-left rows as the language is supposed to be read. (This is actually one of the interpretations supplied in the Talmud for the inability of the Babylonian wise men to decipher the message.) The writing on the wall is subject to change through artistic mediation, and this is especially true in the case of a photograph because of the medium’s peculiar relationship to reality.

We may safely assume that the writing on the wall in a photograph was actually written on an actual wall. It is not an artistic intervention, as it is in a painting, which, like the act of writing itself, is ultimately an accretion of conventions and spontaneous decisions. Writing in a photograph is more akin to found language. A photographer’s true intervention, doubly so, is in the framing. A photograph is what the photographer wants you to see, but it is also everything they do not want you to see. “In photography,” wrote Luigi Ghirri, “the deletion of the space that surrounds the framed image is as important as what is represented; it is thanks to this deletion that the image takes on meaning, becoming measurable. This image continues, of course, in the visible realm of the deleted space, inviting us to see the rest of reality that is not represented.”

A photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans shows a black banner hanging on Berlin Cathedral in 1992. In white Hebrew letters, it reads, NE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. The seeming inability of gentile Europeans to correctly transcribe this phrase aside, many questions are raised by the “deleted space” surrounding this image. Did Tillmans know what was written there, or was he simply drawn to the Hebrew lettering? Is the banner a response to growing neo-Nazi violence after reunification, which may also explain its placement next to photos memorializing Silvio Meier in the 1995 book Wolfgang Tillmans? Or is it reflecting on the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of East Germany a few years before? Why was it written in Hebrew? The writing was on the wall: outside of the frame, we must content ourselves, like Bruno, to speculate with the incredible storehouse of images that each of us possesses.

We have inherited an archetypical image, for example, of crowds gathering to read pamphlets or statements pasted on a wall. The crowd, in this image, is a potential force of disruption and change. Walls have often been a focal point of revolutionary action. The Chinese democracy movement culminating in Tiananmen Square began with the Democracy Wall, which first appeared in Beijing in 1978. The Lennon Wall in Prague similarly became a site of free expression in former Czechoslovakia after an anonymous portrait of the singer appeared there following his murder, inspiring walls of the same name and purpose during demonstrations in Hong Kong over the last decade. Perhaps someone once wrote on a wall, “You may say I’m a dreamer.”

Today, it is difficult to imagine the recapitulation of this archetypical dream in our own neighborhoods. The news, increasingly unbound from physical objects with regularly scheduled hours of distribution, is no longer a force of communal attraction. There is little certainty that any two people, even if they live next to each other, are engaging with overlapping sources. Distant images are disseminated to oversaturated eyes in solitude. Amid this transformation, the walls of Berlin, a city often compared to Babylon, go on talking like the work of so many disembodied hands, delivering messages whose ultimate import we cannot fully comprehend, even as political authorities would prefer us not to see them.

Berlin’s police have painted over graffiti that reads FREE GAZA. At demonstrations, the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has repeatedly been the subject of criminal investigations. The Berlin section of Germany’s domestic intelligence service recently declared the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement to be unconstitutional, a move first proposed by the Alternative für Deutschland party in 2019. On Potsdamer Platz, the once bustling square later hemmed in by the Berlin Wall, there is today a monument to Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heretical freethinking.

A wall is a palimpsest of overwritten statements, but it has always remained a wall. A wall is an object and cannot die. Razed, it becomes rubble and can be reused. The walls of great monuments in antiquity were refashioned into supports for peasants’ hovels. In the worst case, a wall may become ash, which, in the best case, may be used to bed a garden. In the event of a wall’s destruction, the wall does not die but its unseen constellation of images and associations, the allusions and illusions constituting its metaphor, are what have truly been obliterated.

In the case of a house, the most prominent of a wall’s metaphorical associations are safety, protection, and, ultimately, continuity. These cohere into a “home,” the ultimate reserve of memory and dreaming. A spring we return to even after it runs dry. More than ninety percent of the homes in Gaza have been destroyed. Every child in Gaza today, if they are lucky enough to be alive, is effectively homeless. Stringent grammatical similarities aside, a child is not an object because a child can die. The death of a child cannot be unseen, even if the saturation of such images has dimmed our impulse to look.

“Those dying here,” Milosz wrote, “the lonely / forgotten by the world, / our tongue becomes for them / the language of an ancient planet.” Only a latter-day Daniel, whose name means “God is my judge,” can interpolate meaning between the language of the living and the dead—between the language of walls and the dreams once housed in a living child’s mouth. The dream of the West is to grieve tomorrow for what we could have prevented today. The dream of the West is here today and gone tomorrow, like the writing on the wall.