A few months ago, I was bored in class and decided to buy a piece of the Berlin Wall. This proved to be one of my better Ebay buys, although that isn’t really a high standard given that the majority of my purchases are T-Shirts aimed at 50 year old dads. But as much as my piece of the Berlin Wall meant to me, it meant a lot more to Taylor Swift, who apparently took a break from complaining about boys to analyze the geopolitical implications of post-communist Europe. That’s right-- Taylor Swift’s entire 1989 album is about the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of East/ West Germany.
Unfortunately, this realization meant that I had to sift through almost an hour of her music to find evidence to support my idea. I considered this task to be one of the most difficult things I had ever faced, until I attempted to order pizza using the Domino’s App that night.
Lets start with the album title, “1989"-- a clear reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall that year and not at all to the year she was born (Mostly because nothing else was notable about that year, other than the fact that LL Cool J was still a household name). By the year 1989, East and West Germany had over 40 years of “Bad Blood,” and East Germany had a long list of ex-lovers: Russia, the Warsaw Pact, and pretty much any communist country. The creation of the Berlin Wall was the result of the fact that the Germans had problems, but they didn't think they could solve them.
This tepid association wasn’t always the case, though, and Swift’s album is about the ebbs and flows of their relationship. Sure, Germany may have lost two World Wars, but East and West Germany lost them together. In "Bad Blood," Swift writes as if the two Germanys were reminiscing to each other: “Oh, it's so sad to think about the good times, you and I.”
However, Swift is well aware of the political instability surrounding German reunification, and she alludes to its unpredictable effects in “Style,” noting that it “Could end in burning flames or paradise.” The physicality of her language is amplified in the song “All You Had To Do Was Stay”, when she says: “I've been picking up the pieces of the mess you made,” the literal pieces of the Berlin Wall.
But for all her Cold War pondering, Swift remains an optimist. In “Out Of the Woods,” she says that East and West Germany were “built to fall apart, And fall back together (back together).” Germany was built to fall apart, trapped in a post-WWII monkey in the middle situation between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. She sympathizes with the plight of both Germanys, foreshadowing their eventual reunification.
“Out of the Woods” is a likely allusion to Bretton Woods, the conference in New Hampshire when German World War 1 reparations were discussed and the Bank for International Settlements was created, a source of angst for Germany. Part of their anger is built on loss, on the loss of a unified Germany which Swift references in “Clean”-- “The drought was the very worst, When the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst.” In this lyric, the Cold War is the proverbial drought that killed the unified Germany.
“1989” is all about metaphors, and Swift is deeper and more political artist than we give her credit for. In “How You Get the Girl,” she uses a girl as a metaphor for West Germany, singing from her perspective, "I want you for worse or for better, I would wait forever and ever, Broke your heart, I'll put it back together.” West Germany wants them back; in “Wish You Would,” she simply sings-- “I wish you would come back.” There are very few ways to misconstrue that quote.
Their relationship was by no means perfect, and West Germany says, “You always knew how to push my buttons.” East Germany did know how to push West Germany’s buttons by putting soldiers at the Inner German Border to provoke them, with “months, and months of back and forth” tension between them.
Sadly, East and West Germans couldn’t even talk that much to try and fix their relationship. If East Germans wanted to “get out of this town, drive out of the city, away from the crowds," they couldn’t because the Berlin Wall did not allow East Germans to leave the GDR and enter West Germany. Accordingly, Swift sympathizes with the plight of those trying to migrate from East to West Germany amidst heavy security-- “Lights flash and we'll run for the fences…They take their shots, but we're bulletproof.” But Swift sings of an eventual triumph in "Blank Space," inviting former East German citizens to “Grab your passport[s] and my hand,” now that they are freely allowed to enter the land of West Germany.
Those of us who closely followed Taylor Swift knew this day was coming. Just two years before she released “1989,” she released the song “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” a clear hint that she was researching East German attitudes toward the West and vice versa. In “Blank Space,” Swift sings: “we’ll take this way too far.” I think I just did.
