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This article explores ideas of public memory, commemoration and ritual in the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate. The article proposes a novel theory of commemoration as interpassive ritual. It brings together accounts of ideology, psychoanalysis and memory. Commemoration is discussed as a moment of intensified public memory in which ideology and the unconscious are deeply embedded. Chief theoretical sources here are Edward S. Casey, Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek. The article explores the role of ideology in commemoration and the potential of subjects to escape subjection through interpassive rituals. In the article’s second half, the historical events of 1989 are recalled in order to understand why a German subject would seek to enjoy a commemoration of the Berlin Wall’s fall.

Since the 2007-8 financial crisis and subsequent difficulties in the eurozone, Germany's recent economic history has been much studied. However, less attention has been paid to neoliberalisation in eastern Germany in the early 1990s, when the region became a laboratory for political economic experiments. The results were later spread across the (western) German economy, then into the European Union's (EU's) ideological core. As such, a focus on the western 'German model' and the EU can miss the way neoliberalism crept into German social and economic life through German re-unification in the 1990s. Re-unification provided conditions in the former East for a 'natural experiment' with different modes of economic and social governance-a space of exception from the West German model, whose corporatist features were already fraying in the 1980s. In short, re-unification was a turning point in a drift towards neoliberalism, intensifying moves already quietly under way in West Germany in the 1980s. The contentious nature of this shift has largely been forgotten and sidelined.

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