West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands - Hardcover

Eckert, Astrid M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190690054 ISBN 13: 9780190690052

Publisher: OUP USA, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

From the spatial perspective of the inner German border, Astrid M. Eckert casts new light on thehistory of the "old" Federal Republic, and she analyzes the legacies of the border in post-unification Germany. The border, as is turns out, not only defined the GDR but also shaped economic relations, environmental policy and mobility in the Federal Republic. This brilliant book is a timely reminder of how borders and walls remake the human and natural environments they seek to divide. Deeply researched and deftly written, West Germany and the Iron Curtain is a major accomplishment that is certain to have a lasting impact on the field. (Frank Biess, University of California, San Diego)

Astrid Eckert has written a magnificent, multi-faceted history of West Germany's eastern borderlands during and after the Cold War. Her pioneering analysis combines economic, social and environmental approaches and is essential reading for all students of post-1945 Europe. (Pertti Ahonen, Professor of History, University of Jyväskylä (Finland), author of Death at the Berlin Wall)

West Germany and the Iron Curtain shows how the Cold War border dividing Germany reshaped economic life, ecological conditions, and political struggles on both sides of Germany's Iron Curtain. Eckert's economic and environmental history of the borderlands offers an important material corrective to histories focused primarily on the discursive power of borders. This is a timely book, not only for German and borderland studies, but also for our contemporary political moment. The revalorization of borders during the current populist wave makes it all the more important to examine how 'hard' borders have distorted ecologies, economies, and political cultures in the past. (Eagle Glassheim, Author of Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland (2016))

For much of the Cold War decades, the world's most militarized border was that between East and West Germany. In this exhaustively researched yet accessibly written book, Eckert balances local nuance and European context in tracing the multiple meanings of the border for West Germans living along it. A brilliant exploration of the economic and environmental peculiarities of the border zone. (J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University)

This well-conceptualized and well-argued history of the border separating East and West Germany illustrates that even as it was shaped by politics, nature shaped politics in turn. A detailed and concrete case study in the mutual dependence of environment and society that will interest historians of Germany and environmental historians alike. (Timothy Scott Brown, Northeastern University)

About the Author:

Astrid M. Eckert is Associate Professor of History at Emory University in Atlanta. She earned her PhD in History at Free University Berlin, Germany. She is the author of Struggle for the Files. The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War (2012). She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy, and a Humboldt Foundation Fellow.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0190690054
• ISBN 13: 9780190690052
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368