A New Look at the Iron Curtain

Abstract

ACCORDING TO the generally held belief, it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase iron curtain in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent.' However, although the metaphor undoubtedly started its popularity on that day, Churchill had used it before that speech, and he was not the inventor of it. The metaphorical use of the words iron and curtain in English as well as, for instance, in German and French goes back at least to the seventeenth century. They may have occasionally joined forces, so to speak, but such an accidental union could hardly have led to the now ubiquitous politically charged phrase. The stage for its origin was rather set in the theater. In the eighteenth century a theater in Lyon introduced an iron curtain to prevent fires from spreading.' The Drury Lane in London followed suit in 1794.2 Theaters in Paris have been legally bound to have such a curtain since 1864; German theaters, since 1889.' After the disastrous fire at the Ring Theater in Vienna in 1881, many theaters in Europe adopted a fireproof curtain, and at least in Germany, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia it was generally called an iron curtain.4 As early as 1819 this new theatrical curtain seems to have started its career as a metaphor. A book published in London in that year contains the sentence: 'On the nineteenth November we crossed the river Betwah, and as if an iron curtain had dropped between us and the avenging angel, the deaths diminished.'5 Other examples of the metaphorical usage have been found in Scandinavian and in a novel by H. G. Wells.'