Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain

Abstract

The fiftieth anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall in August 2011 has resulted in a flurry of new publications on the history of the border between the two German states during the Cold War. Most studies, however, have dealt with the forced separation of East and West Berliners on 13 August 1961 as well as its prehistory. Moreover, historiography has concentrated on the impact of the erection of the Berlin Wall on diplomatic relations and the transition to détente. By contrast, Edith Sheffer investigates how ordinary Germans appropriated, opposed or helped construct the Iron Curtain, as both an administrative and physical border and a mental barrier, from 1945 to 1989. By tracing the transformation of Burned Bridge, a stretch of land between the adjacent German towns of Neustadt bei Coburg (Bavaria, FRG) and Sonneberg (Thuringia, GDR), as a ‘fault line in the Cold War’ (p. 3), she aims to demonstrate that the Iron Curtain was not merely imposed and enforced on the Germans. In fact, Sheffer maintains that the border between the two German states also resulted from ‘the mundane attitudes and actions of ordinary people’, symbolizing not only ‘political failure’, but also ‘social breakdown’ (p. 6).