Oxford University Press West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands

Product Description West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them. Review Engaging and well-written....One of the greatest contributions of this book is the way it situates environmental history among the major narratives of German history Pollution knew no borders, forcing the West German government to engage in 'environmental diplomacy.'... The militarized border also had a profound impact on plant and animal life. ― Dolores L. Augustine, American Historical ReviewEckert dispenses with the familiar tales about the making of the border and its inherent brutality. In this book, the Iron Curtain is just there, a massive barrier that created a range of regional challenges, and Eckert studies them in admirable depth.... The narrative moves beyond the threshold of 1990 and follows stories into the years after reunification. All the chapters are meticulously researched.... The borderlands were not so much a laboratory but a protected area where authorities went to great lengths to keep the promise of the miracle years alive. The result was a peculiar region that did not feel all that peculiar: it had economic stability, mass consumption and the consensual political culture of the old Federal Republic....But Germany's division is history, and so is the old Federal Republic and all the certainties that it had in store. Eckert's book is a study of a world that is irretrievably gone. ― Frank Uekötter, English Historical ReviewWest Germany and the Iron Curtain brings a fascinating perspective to the flourishing literature on Cold War history, which has been recently concerned with dismantling Cold War myths and reimagining the Cold War period from a multifaceted perspective. ― Cristina Florea, H-BorderlandsAn ambitious re-examination of German history from its literal margins. Eckert's methodologically innovative analysis not only straddles the East-West divide but interrogates 1945 and 1989/90 as chronological caesuras. Refracted through the environmental history of these borderlands, Germany's political, social and cultural history looks familiar but also different in illuminating ways: Cold War border pilgrimages resemble their interwar predecessors, East Germany's devastating pollution looks less like an exception than like the rule, and the apparent successes of unification are shown to be both ambiguous and highly contingent. Written with nuance, perspicacity and subtle humour, West Germany and the