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 Kristin Poling West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. Astrid Eckert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+422, black & white illustrations, endnotes. $105.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-1906-9005-2. $29.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-1975-8231-2. In her book on West Germany's eastern borderlands, Astrid Eckert recounts the story of a tourist visiting the border in 1964, who, on being shown where East Germany lay across the Elbe River, cried out, "Why, there is no Iron Curtain!" (95). For this tourist, and not her alone, the global significance and powerful iconography of the Iron Curtain had shaped her expectations and obscured the reality of the border. The German-German border's very prominence as a Cold War frontier made it harder to see. From behind that powerful metaphor, Eckert seeks to restore the 1,400-kilometer border to visibility with all its complexity and materiality, its regional specificity, and its natural environments. Her project, drawing on extensive research in diverse archival and print sources, is to write the history of West Germany's borderlands as a place that provided homes for both people and nonhuman natures, existed before 1949, and continued to exist after 1990. The results are richly rewarding, as a study of the Federal Republic, a contribution to border studies, and an example of an integrated approach to environmental history that incorporates culture, politics, and economics. Unlike other landmark studies focused on the materiality and local experience of the German-German boundary, such as Daphne Berdahl's Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (1999) and Edith Sheffer's Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (2011), Eckert does not zoom in on a single exemplary place to illuminate the dynamics of the border. Instead, she takes as her subject the entirety of the 40-kilometer-wide strip defined as the "zonal borderlands" and eligible for federal borderland aid. Through her six thematic chapters, Eckert shows that while proximity to the German Democratic Republic gave the West German zonal borderlands a unified identity, the border remained a heterogeneous landscape. It included open land and rural areas, but also major cities from Lübeck to Hof. The strip intersected with the Harz Mountains, the Drömling wetlands, the Bavarian forest, and several major rivers, including the Elbe and the Werra. Through borderland [End Page 88] aid (chapter 2), border tourism (chapter 3), environmental diplomacy (chapter 4), landscape and wildlife management (chapter 5), and the controversy over a planned-but-never-built nuclear waste disposal center at Görleben in the northeastern corner of Lower Saxony (chapter 6), West German policies and attitudes set apart the borderlands as an exceptional zone, reflecting attitudes toward division and toward the German Democratic Republic. Eckert also shows, however, the ways in which Cold War politics and culture butted up against the materiality of the region's landscapes and features. The Iron Curtain comes and goes, both shaping and shaped by the environments it traversed. Throughout the book, Eckert attends to how the exceptional conditions of division were grounded in prewar circumstances. In one memorable example, she recounts how the language, planning expertise, and visual iconography used to describe the German-German boundary in the 1950s referenced the loss of territory after World War I. Gruesome metaphors of mutilation on the "bleeding border" resurfaced, and spatial planners like Gerhard Isenberg studied the economics of the newly drawn borders of 1919 in an attempt to better understand the borders of 1949. Justifications for borderland aid even directly referenced the precedent of Osthilfe, the aid provided by the Weimar government to bankrupt Junkers in East Prussia—a reference perhaps all the more telling for its inaptness, since the earlier relief program had aimed to shore up large agricultural estates and had ended in scandal (56–57). The value of Eckert's long-term view is especially evident in the chapters dealing with environmental issues. While inter-German environmental diplomacy made environmental concerns more visible and salient for...