Burned Bridge
How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain
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- $38.99
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- $38.99
Publisher Description
The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 shocked the world. Ever since, the image of this impenetrable barrier between East and West, imposed by communism, has been a central symbol of the Cold War.
Based on vast research in untapped archival, oral, and private sources, Burned Bridge reveals the hidden origins of the Iron Curtain, presenting it in a startling new light. Historian Edith Sheffer's unprecedented, in-depth account focuses on Burned Bridge-the intersection between two sister cities, Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg, Germany's largest divided population outside Berlin. Sheffer demonstrates that as Soviet and American forces occupied each city after the Second World War, townspeople who historically had much in common quickly formed opposing interests and identities. The border walled off irreconcilable realities: the differences of freedom and captivity, rich and poor, peace and bloodshed, and past and present. Sheffer describes how smuggling, kidnapping, rape, and killing in the early postwar years led citizens to demand greater border control on both sides--long before East Germany fortified its 1,393 kilometer border with West Germany. It was in fact the American military that built the first barriers at Burned Bridge, which preceded East Germany's borderland crackdown by many years. Indeed, Sheffer shows that the physical border between East and West was not simply imposed by Cold War superpowers, but was in some part an improvised outgrowth of an anxious postwar society.
Ultimately, a wall of the mind shaped the wall on the ground. East and West Germans became part of, and helped perpetuate, the barriers that divided them. From the end of World War II through two decades of reunification, Sheffer traces divisions at Burned Bridge with sharp insight and compassion, presenting a stunning portrait of the Cold War on a human scale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stanford assistant professor of history Sheffer has written a meticulous analysis of a social experiment that began in 1945 when Soviet troops occupied Sonneberg and Americans Neustadt, sister cities whose city halls were three miles apart. The first of the book's three sections covers 1945 1952, when the unfenced "green border" between the two cities became a "wild frontier," with so much violence and harassment that citizens themselves urged more control. From 1952 to 1961, East Germany built fences and cut transit links, actions mostly successful in confirming the cities' psychological separation. From 1961 to 1989, the border progressively hardened; Sheffer emphasizes that this occurred with little violence but much local grumbling and negotiation. Both sides preferred to avoid trouble. Easterners trying to escape were more likely to be caught by local civilians and police than border guards. Sheffer's Ph.D. thesis, although a superior example, is lucidly written with plenty of anecdotes, but also an avalanche of statistics in the appendixes. This is serious academic research on a narrow subject that will interest serious history buffs. 34 illus.