Introduction

Abstract

The year 2009 saw the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The images of the ‘wallpeckers’ at Berlin’s former Todesstreifen had become the symbolic embodiments of the major shift in the post-WWII world order and greeted newspaper readers, TV viewers and bloggers on a nearly daily basis. But the previous eight years had entailed another shift that, in the present of 2009, demanded to be narrated even more urgently. Since 9/11, another proclaimed end-fight between the forces of good and evil had incorporated the rhetoric visions that had been well rehearsed by politics and the public culture of the USA’s allies and prodigies during the Cold War era.¹ Good, we had been told by George W. Bush’s hawks, were the USA and Europe, now including its new states, once lodged behind the Berlin Wall in the hold of the grand narrative of ‘really existing’ socialism. But evil had undergone a makeover. This new evil, the media audiences of the West were told, was embodied by the bearded head of Osama Bin Laden, who symbolized the supposedly globalized threat of Islam. Accordingly, an earlier event of 1989 was discussed as part of the social memory of that year: the Rushdie affair surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s satirical novel The Satanic Verses (1988). In a classic ‘after this, therefore because of this’ storyline, the belief-war that had developed around Rushdie’s book had to be seen in conjunction with the fall of Communism.