Synopses & Reviews
The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of this impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War.
Based on vast research in untapped archival, oral, and private sources, Burned Bridge reveals the hidden origins of the Iron Curtain, presenting it in a startling new light. Historian Edith Sheffer's unprecedented, in-depth account focuses on Burned Bridge-the intersection between two sister cities, Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany's largest divided population outside Berlin. Sheffer demonstrates that as Soviet and American forces occupied each city after the Second World War, townspeople who historically had much in common quickly formed opposing interests and identities. The border walled off irreconcilable realities: the differences of freedom and captivity, rich and poor, peace and bloodshed, and past and present. Sheffer describes how smuggling, kidnapping, rape, and killing in the early postwar years led citizens to demand greater border control on both sides--long before East Germany fortified its 1,393 kilometer border with West Germany. It was in fact the American military that built the first barriers at Burned Bridge, which preceded East Germany's borderland crackdown by many years. Indeed, Sheffer shows that the physical border between East and West was not simply imposed by Cold War superpowers, but was in some part an improvised outgrowth of an anxious postwar society.
Ultimately, a wall of the mind shaped the wall on the ground. East and West Germans became part of, and helped perpetuate, the barriers that divided them. From the end of World War II through two decades of reunification, Sheffer traces divisions at Burned Bridge with sharp insight and compassion, presenting a stunning portrait of the Cold War on a human scale.
Review
"An accessible, intriguing academic study tracking the building of the "wall in the head" between East and West Germany long before the actual construction in 1961." -Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Sheffer's meticulous reconstruction of life on the German-German frontier sheds welcome light on broader questions of German history, and on the way human communities create and recreate themselves." --Times Higher Education Supplement
"An accessible, intriguing academic study tracking the building of the "wall in the head" between East and West Germany long before the actual construction in 1961." -Kirkus Reviews
"The Cold War may have been triggered by the great powers, but Edith Sheffer shows that it was also given shape and reinforced by ordinary people who confronted its political realities every day. Her sensitive biography of a divided German community, ranging across the entire Cold War through reunification, is filled with arresting detail, fresh evidence, and surprises. This book helps us understand not just the trauma of the Cold War but also the many troubles Germans have faced in knitting their fractured nation together after the fall of the Wall in 1989. An outstanding and innovative work." --William I. Hitchcock, University of Virginia
"Edith Sheffer's exquisitely nuanced and deeply researched narrative rewrites the history of the division of Germany, revealing an East/West border marked by the infamous Wall but actually constructed over time by postwar violence, Cold War tensions, and above all by the local everyday actions and attitudes of ordinary Germans living with and in both sides of the border."--Atina Grossmann, author of Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
"This fascinating micro-history of living with the Iron Curtain traces its divisive social and political impact. Based on exhaustive research, the book explores the local complicity in the construction, maintenance, and subversion of the barrier, illuminates the human dimension of the German division, and explains its lingering post-unification effects."-Konrad Jarausch, author of After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995
"Edith Sheffer provides fascinating glimpses of the ways in which the Wall between East and West Germany was constructed-in every sense-by Germans on the ground, and in turn affected the character of life on either side. Significations of difference, emotional ties, misapprehensions, and mutual hostilities, were a living reality, changing over time and persisting in new ways long after the Wall itself has disappeared." -Mary Fulbrook, author of Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships
"Edith Sheffer powerfully contributes to dismantling established views on the Cold War. Locals had a constant role in producing the border and, in a bitter irony, neither efforts to evade nor ways of considering the border 'normal' overcame the sense of estrangement among former neighbors." -Alf Lüdtke, University of Erfurt
"Lucidly written with plenty of anecdotes...will interest serious history buffs." -Publishers Weekly
"Highly recommended." --Choice Magazine
Review
andldquo;Komska is a gifted writer. Her bookandrsquo;s titleandmdash;The Icon Curtainandmdash;announces a work that looks at the destruction, preservation, and production of symbolic and religious artifacts that both traverse and solidify the ideological barrier. Through a series of different framesandmdash;iconic religious figures and images of expellees, border travelogues, photography of rubbleandmdash;Komska unravels a cultural genealogy of the Iron Curtain beyond its military, political, social, and economic functions, closing the gap between fields of visual, literary, and religious studies. She examines borders as sites of creative cultural production, and also how these productions shape the peripheries into centers. The Icon Curtain will contribute greatly to border studies and Cold War studies, particularly from the cultural studies angle.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;A truly excellent book.and#160;The Icon Curtainand#160;is part and parcel of an expanding literature on the making of the border in Cold War Germany. But Komskaandrsquo;s book is distinct and highly original. Komska examines the ways in which former Sudeten Germans narrativized the border in both text and image. She analyzes, in other words, the cultural productions and practices of Sudeten Germans themselves. In so doing, she excavates a body of sources that has thus far completely eluded the attention of historians, anthropologists, or literary critics. With considerable skill and energy, Komska deploys a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives to her multifaceted source body. What emerges from this analysis is not a series of loosely related case studies but rather a specific and quite coherent set of cultural practices and representations. Komskaandrsquo;s study reconstructs an imaginary world, a set of fantasies that sought to reconcile traditional attachment to an always contested homeland with the new reality of an increasingly impermeable Cold War border. This is one of the most erudite, well-written, and original analyses of the cultural history of the Cold War that I am aware of. I have no doubts that it will have a defining impact on a variety of fields.andrdquo;
Review
andldquo;Komskaandrsquo;s work on the part of the Iron Curtain further to the south is a welcome addition. It is not often that a forest forms the centrepiece in historical writing. The Icon Curtain is one of those instances. Komskaandrsquo;s research focuses on the Bohemian Forest on the border moving up and down between the western side of Czechoslovakia and the West German border. Her work not only explores a less-studied locus of Cold War tension, but it also aims to deepen our understanding of the Iron Curtain by looking at representations rather than events, and by looking at literary texts and religious artefacts rather than experiences. . . . Komskaandrsquo;s research persuasively shows how the character of the Iron Curtain was far from uniform throughout its length. . . . The content is enlightening and she demonstrates how using geographical, literary and visual sources can greatly enhance our understanding of this era.andrdquo;
Synopsis
The Iron Curtain did not existand#151;at least not as we usually imagine it. Rather than a stark, unbroken line dividing East and West in Cold War Europe, the Iron Curtain was instead made up of distinct landscapes, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. This book traces a genealogy of one such landscapeand#151;the woods between Czechoslovakia and West Germanyand#151;to debunk our misconceptions about the iconic partition.
Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europeand#8217;s oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two long-standing German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the centuryand#8217;s most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germanyand#8217;s quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtainand#8217;s better-known segments.
Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.
About the Author
Yuliya Komska is assistant professor of German studies at Dartmouth College. She lives in Plainfield, NH.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Peter Schneider
Introduction
Part One: Demarcation Line, 1945-1952
1. Foundations: Burned Bridge
2. Insecurity: Border Mayhem
3. Inequality: Economic Divides
4. Kickoff: Political Skirmishing
Part Two: "Living Wall," 1952-1961
5. Shock: Border Closure and Deportation
6. Shift: Everyday Boundaries
7. Surveillance: Individual Controls
Part Three: Iron Curtain, 1961-1989
8. Home: Life in the Prohibited Zone
9. Fault Line: Life in the Fortifications
10. Disconnect: East-West Relations
Epilogue: New Divides
Notes
Bibliography
Appendices