West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert

Abstract

Reviewed by: West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert Thomas Lekan West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. By Astrid Eckert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 444. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-0190690052. Astrid Eckert’s innovative and deeply researched monograph reveals the power of borderland studies to shift our historical understanding of West German state formation, tourism development, and environmental policy and to uncover unexpected continuities across the 1989/90 divide. In her deft hands, the forty-kilometer strip known as the “zonal borderlands” (Zonenrandgebiete) moves from the periphery to the center of West German history, transforming the movement of people, animals, plants, and pollutants in ways that defy the static image of an impenetrable Iron Curtain. As she writes, “real borders produce borderlands” (49)—that is, infrastructures do not merely reflect broader political or socioeconomic trends but create them anew. Working thematically rather than chronologically, Eckert begins her study of the inter-German frontier with a historical economic geography of the “East of the West” (chapter 2), noting that the emplacement of the fortified border in the early 1950s created a symbolic and material space for elected officials and chambers of commerce to lobby Bonn for economic subsidies as part of federal efforts to equalize burdens and manage development. They characterized the region as “the last outpost of freedom and yet desolate and underdeveloped—the poorhouse of the otherwise prospering Federal Republic” (13). They were remarkably successful, fending off domestic critics of pork barrel politics and scrutiny by the European Commission to secure funding even as other, more economically marginal regions such as the deindustrializing Rhine-Ruhr corridor stagnated. The portrayal of the borderlands as a neglected victim of Cold War geopolitics nonetheless beckoned curiosity-seekers hoping to glimpse across the “Iron Curtain.” Eckert shows that both residents and state officials tried to cash in on this “creepy tourism” (Gruseltourismus) to stimulate the economy and cultivate anticommunism. Metropolitan West Germans soon delighted in their discovery of “sleepy villages” (118) bypassed by postwar modernization and, sometimes to the chagrin of locals, bought up second homes—setting the stage for urbane environmentalists to join forces with farmers in “agrarian-leftist” (120) alliances against nuclearization in the 1970s and 1980s. Eckert argues convincingly that GDR efforts to block Western visitors’ views led to a more fortified—and deadly—border regimen. Indeed, despite federal lobbyists and tourist promoters’ lamentations over [End Page 642] partition, subsidization, and tourism contributed to a growing acceptance of the border as a permanent fact of life. Such dependencies on federal aid left the borderlands particularly vulnerable in the 1990s as the “new” Federal Republic shifted its aid programs just a few kilometers eastward. The second half of West Germany and the Iron Curtain presents an innovative prehistory of postunification Germany’s much-vaunted ecological “restoration” of the East (chapters 4 and 5) and the antinuclear protests at Gorleben in Lower Saxony that ultimately halted nuclear energy production altogether (chapter 6). In these chapters, the borderlands function as a contact zone, forcing both states to confront transboundary toxins seeping across shared water- and airways, reckon with dynamic “transboundary natures” (chapter 5) emerging along a “no man’s landscape” (159–160) of abandoned agricultural fields, and reconfigure siting protocols for the nuclear industry. Such entanglements shaped the Environmental Accords of 1987 which, though ineffectual at the time, prepared the way for the rapid remediation and renaturing of the East after unification. Chapter 5 takes aim at the “redemptive stories” (162) surrounding the Green Belt project, whose goal of creating blossoming nature reserves out of the defunct “death strip” has missed the deeper history of the border installations and its ecological footprint. Well-intentioned NGOs largely failed to see how militarization actively produced the seemingly intact biotopes they cherished, including the needless deaths of thousands of wild animals in minefields and wanton SED hunting expeditions. Redemptive narratives that take 1990 as their baseline also elided decades of environmental diplomacy between the GDR and the FRG over transboundary pollutants. Eckert argues convincingly that Western negotiators who hoped to stem the alarming volume of industrial toxins...