Abstract
Stories Without Borders by Julia Sonnevend (assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan) conceptualizes “global iconic events” and examines their “dimensions” based on the case of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.
With a clear pedagogic ambition, this well-written essay is particularly valuable for researchers, teachers, and students in media studies and journalism, political science, history, memory and cultural studies.
Scholars interested in the theorization of events, discussions on globalization, and in the role of the media as mythmakers and institutions of cultural memory will find the first two chapters and conclusion particularly thought-provoking. The book’s central five chapters provide a detailed study of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a persuasive case of “global iconic event.” By the end of the essay, the book’s first sentence, “There was no Berlin Wall, and it never fell,” is well proven.
Based on solid archival research, the book tells the fascinating story of the materialization of the wall over four generations. As Sonnevend writes, “the ‘real’ Berlin Wall was not one but two walls and a myriad of obstacles between them”; it was a “multilayered and multigenerational border-control regime.” The documented analysis of the press conference that confusedly announced the new travel regulation for crossing the border between east and west Berlin convincingly shows that the “fall” of the Berlin Wall derived from a fundamental misunderstanding. Throughout the essay, the author demonstrates how the media precipitated the fall of the Wall, not through objective, fact-based reporting, but via storytelling and mythmaking. More specifically, she identifies five dimensions of global iconic events involving the media: foundation, mythologization, condensation, counter-narration, and remediation. Connecting media and memory studies, the longest chapter covers the dimension of “remediation” through processes of “recycling, reenactment, possession and memorialization.” More than mere remediation, what Sonnevend describes is often the instrumentation of memory for commercial or political purposes, sometimes in preposterous forms. We follow the author’s journey through the archives but also the streets of Berlin, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, or Bethlehem, where she experienced the physical presence of other walls.
Two major criticisms of the book can be briefly formulated. One relates to lacks in the literature review; the other is concerned with the different categorizations drawn by the author.
Although Sonnevend insists that to contribute to turning news into “global iconic events,” journalists have to be storytellers rather than objective reporters, she largely ignores the rich literature that has examined the “bardic function” of journalism (see notably Barkin, 1984; Hartley, 1982 or Propp, 1984). More importantly, despite valuable efforts at defining her research object, “global iconic events,” the essay fails to discuss in depth the central notion of iconicity. This is crucial because the author often designates some events as obviously iconic (such as 9/11) and others as not at all. But what are the favorable conditions for iconicity? Among other scholars who have dealt with iconic images, we can cite Andén Papadopoulos (2008), Drechsel (2010), Griffin (1999), Hariman and Lucaites (2010), or Brink (2000). Sonnevend does refer to some of these authors but often for other reasons or only briefly.
Reviewing the literature on icons and iconicity in a multidisciplinary perspective, including visual communication, art history, and theology may have led the author to better analyze visual materials and to lay down the foundations for the five dimensions of “global iconic events” that structure the book. Why these five and not others? Why separate some that seem so closely connected?
This leads me to the second criticism. In her essay, Sonnevend draws several typologies: “five dimensions of transnational storytelling,” which constitutes the backbone of the book; “four distinct ways in which a global iconic event moves globally,” and “three ways in which global iconic events in general and the fall of the Berlin Wall in particular may shape individuals and societies.” When the author simply announces, “In this book I will highlight four forms of remediation,” we cannot help but ask, Why? How did she “get” to these dimensions and categories? If not trying to convince us of their “necessity,” the author should have more carefully justified her choices. The dimension of “counter-narration,” for instance, might have been analyzed for its contributions to the mythologization, condensation, and/or remediation processes, rather than as a separate dimension. The fact that the chapter dedicated to “counter-narration” is the shortest is not incidental. By limiting counter-narratives to those competing with the “event” narratives at the time of their production, the author does not pay enough attention to those produced many years or decades after the event occurred. Yet those may be the most challenging to the dominant memory. In an age of social networks, when the “echo chamber” of conspiracy theories has so much expanded, counter-narratives may both be framed as part of the dimension of “remediation” and deserve broader consideration. Without falling pray to the latest intellectual fashions, we can then reexamine these events in a post-truth era that is supposedly marked by fake news.
However, as Sonnevend acknowledges in her daring criticism of Media Events, “No book can cover everything, and no reviewer should expect the impossible.” All in all, Sonnevend provides her readers with a multidisciplinary perspective on late modernity, the role played by the media and the phenomenon of globalization. Her work with key concepts may seem overambitious or somehow passé. But Sonnevend has met the challenge. She has not only renewed some of our conceptions of classic notions, but she has uncovered fascinating tensions and contrasts, between destruction (e.g., reenactment of the fall of the Berlin Wall) and preservation (of the remnants of the wall and its memory), between sacralization and instrumentation of the memories, and between the idea that all walls must fall eventually and the fact that more walls have been constructed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.