Behind Walls / Hinter Mauern
Closed Borders as a Threat to an Open Society
»Fortress Europe« from the outside, free Europe on the inside?
»We have to bear these images«, said Michael Kretschmer, Minister-President of Saxony, in November 2021 as a response to freezing refugees at the border between Poland and Belarus. His words brought forth something that is often forgotten: borders are not just obstacles for people who want to overcome them from the outside. They also change the societies that try to isolate themselves.
Volker M. Heins and Frank Wolff show the effect that walls and the defence against...
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»We have to bear these images«, said Michael Kretschmer, Minister-President of Saxony, in November 2021 as a response to freezing refugees at the border between Poland and Belarus. His words brought forth something that is often forgotten: borders are not just obstacles for people who want to overcome them from the outside. They also change the societies that try to isolate themselves.
Volker M. Heins and Frank Wolff show the effect that walls and the defence against migration take within: the EU’s urging for »secure external borders« subverts the European promise of peace and constitutionality. Ultimately, secured borders endanger precisely those democratic values and structures they purport to protect.
2023, 197 pages
Persons
Volker M. Heins
Author
Volker M. Heins, born in 1957, is a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard, Yale and in Jerusalem. His 2021 publication Offene Grenzen für alle. Eine notwendige Utopie was nominated for the NDR Non-Fiction Prize.
Volker M. Heins
Author
Volker M. Heins, born in 1957, is a Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen. He was a visiting scholar at...
© Thomas Wieland
Frank Wolff
Author
Frank Wolff, born in 1977, is a Research Assistant at the Department of History and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies in Osnabrück. He is also a Research Associate at Bard College in Berlin. In 2019, his highly acclaimed book Die Mauergesellschaft. Kalter Krieg, Menschenrechte und die deutsch-deutsche Migration 1961-1989 was published by Suhrkamp Verlag.
Frank Wolff
Author
Frank Wolff, born in 1977, is a Research Assistant at the Department of History and the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies in...
© Boris Mehl