The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall | Book Release Event
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# The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall
Reading and Discussion | Book Release Event with Photographer Gesche Würfel and Translator Alta Price
With respondent Alice Goff and moderator Nicole G. Burgoyne
Register here: The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall / Calendar of Events | The University of Chicago
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989; in 1990, Germany was reunited with the integration of the former German Democratic Republic into the West German political and economic system. The physical division may be forgotten and invisible in many places. However, its lingering effects can still be felt: the goal to create a united Germany with a collective identity has yet to be achieved. Gesche Würfel’s (b. Bremerhaven, 1976; lives and works in New York) most recent photographic work investigates these divisions.
The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall explores the topography along the country’s division and proposes a new way of thinking about the legacy of the wall: Würfel traveled the complete course of the former Berlin Wall, stopping every 2.8 kilometers-in a nod to the 28-year history of the Wall-to document the present-day state of affairs at the line of separation in Berlin and Brandenburg. Complementing the photographs, created specifically for this book project, of scenes where the city’s division was reality, the artist, urban planner, and sociologist gathered materials from the Stasi Records Archives, the East German secret police, and spoke to witnesses, including political prisoners, former guest workers, and representatives of German politics and culture about their recollections. Würfel paints a multifaceted panorama and portrait of a Germany whose division and reunification continue to shape the country profoundly.
Alta L. Price runs a publishing consultancy specialized in literature and nonfiction texts on art, architecture, design, and culture. Price’s work was awarded the 2013 Gutekunst Prize, and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, the European Literature Network, Specimen, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. Of the more than 40 books Price has translated from Italian and German, novelist Juli Zeh’s New Year was a finalist for both the 2022 PEN America Translation Prize and the Helen & Kurt Wolff Prize. Price’s most recent translations include Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti (Astra House, 2022), Zeh’s About People (World Editions, 2023), Giorgio Agamben’s What I Saw, Heard, Learned… (Seagull Books, 2023), Alberto Giacometti’s selected family letters, Time Passes too Soon (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024), André Butzer’s Friedrich Hölderlin: The Seasons (Taschen, 2025), and Gesche Würfel’s The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall (Distanz, 2025). Price received a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for Maddalena Fingerle’s Lingua madre.
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