Hello, welcome. Please go to slides 1 and 2.

The Walls Project began to take shape in summer 2019 in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. After years of collaboration, we were looking for approaches to our shared European history that could take us past Brexit into new structures of cooperation. As visitors to each other’s universities, we had enjoyed the fact that we are all occupants of walled cities; but while the experience of living within and between walls is something our communities celebrate, we were also aware that they enforce the relentless cycle of hostilities that have defined Europe as a social and political space. At some stage in our shared European pasts, we had all been enemies as well as friends:

Slide 3

As the ‘ordinary people’ of Vilnius discovered in 1391, city walls can be a provocation, a trap, and a prison as well as safety and home. The British occupation of Berlin 1945 – 1955 laid the foundations for the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961: while West Germany’s leadership of European ‘union’ has consolidated ties of friendship and cooperation, it is haunted by a cold war history of distance and separation. Peter Schneider’s novel The Wall Jumper (1982) documents life in the divided city. He spends his time ‘jumping’ west to east, east to west, gathering stories about those who do the same. As his novel ends, he lies in the dark of his bedroom, sensing life around him through the walls of his apartment but aware of the hard reality of the walls outside:

Slide 4

As we made contact with heritage workers and conservationists in our respective cities, another set of intersections emerged. We had begun discussions in the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it emerged that York city archaeologists are planning a wall anniversary ‘York 2022’, and Vilnius has a city anniversary in 2023. Around this timeframe, therefore, we put together the outline of a project – initially called ‘Cities with Walls’, rewriting the title of York-born poet W. H. Auden’s ‘Cities without Walls’ – proposing an online reading group, research papers, and critical and creative workshops in Berlin 2021, York 2022 and Vilnius 2023.

The pandemic brings a new urgency to this project. Reading Peter Schnieder’s novel again now, his ‘feeling of separation’ evokes new experiences of living within and between walls:

Slide 5

Lockdown has brought UNESCO’s legacy of division and protection forcibly and physically ‘home’. Will the ‘new normal’ of life inside COVID-19 prevent us creating the post-Brexit connections we were looking for when we began this idea? Can walls that have divided and protected us in quarantine become ‘historic walls’ in UNESCO’s sense, ‘a living part of our urban areas, evolving away from their role of division to contribute to social cohesion and sustainability’? What questions do we need to ask to be able to answer this? How do we need to ask them? What collaborations within the University of York could help us consolidate this project?

Please watch this beautiful short film made by two Italian filmmakers using a drone to film lockdown Milan and record the thoughts of inhabitants ‘trapped’ inside its walls. It might suggest answers.