Picturing the past: The Berlin Wall at 25

Abstract

Although the mass media is an important tool that audiences rely on to learn about the past, the relationship among journalism, history, and memory is still underdeveloped; visual collective memory, like visual studies in other subfields, has received even less attention than written and textual representations of collective memory. To address that gap, this article uses a qualitative content analysis to assess how 15 newspapers commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s opening through photographs. Newspapers from countries that were capitalist and communist in 1989 are compared to identify the ways that different cultures ‘remember’ the same past. Five genres of images emerged: iconic photographs, memorials, metonymic and mythological portraits, metonymic relics, and images of resistance, though these genres were framed differently depending on a country’s political system in 1989. In comparing this cross-cultural collective memory, this study looks at what these visual commemorations reveal about cross-cultural anniversary practices, an area of memory studies that has received little attention.