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In an Al Jazeera America opinion piece, Assistant Professor of German Studies Yuliya Komska writes that the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is missing something: acknowledgement of a wall that did not fall.

Komska writes that “we have lost sight of the Iron Curtain that didn’t fall, the so-called prayer wall, on the border between the former West Germany and Czechoslovakia. Its existence has escaped us for two reasons: the fixation on Berlin as the Cold War’s traumatic yet scintillating hub and our view of borders in general.”

The prayer wall, she says, was neither mined nor patrolled. “But its beginnings are inseparable from those of the military border, whose outlines it contoured,” she writes.

Read the full opinion piece, published 11/08/14 by Al Jazeera America.