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

Abstract

The Berlin Wall still grips public attention as the iconic Cold War border. By shifting our focus to a less sensational border in a rural region dividing East and West Germany, Edith Sheffer's brilliant book reveals how geopolitical conflicts and state-imposed policing may have redrawn the map, but that “local actions actually constituted the border” (p. 37) and the Iron Curtain was actually an improvised “living system” (p. 167). The “Burned Bridge” was a medieval road, made of logs burned to prevent rot, connecting the toy manufacturing towns of Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg. For Sheffer it becomes the perfect metaphor for the Iron Curtain, as the new Cold War physical and mental border severed these towns' interconnection, fatefully putting Sonneberg into the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Neustadt into the Federal Republic (FRG). Starting in the 1940s and ending just after 1989, Sheffer's narrative demonstrates how average citizens' local responses normalized these new political fissures to make possible the Berlin Wall's erection and the inter-German border's closure in 1961.