On the night of November 9, 1989, after months of unrest in Europe and East Germany, the checkpoints between East and West Berlin were suddenly, almost accidentally, opened, reuniting the two sides of the divided city, and bringing together a divided Europe and two worlds that had been apart for nearly thirty years. However, the fall of the Berlin Wall was just one of many signs of change that came with 1989; before long a spate of revolutions, the "Autumn of Nations," had spread across Europe and by December, it appeared that the Cold War was over.
To mark the twentieth anniversary of this momentous collapse, and to shed some light on how it came to pass, Words without Borders presents The Wall in My Head, an exciting anthology that features fiction, essays, images, and original documents to pick up where most popular accounts of the Cold War end, and trace the path of the revolutionary spirit of 1989 from its origins to the present day.
The Wall in My Head combines work from the generation of writers and artists who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain firsthand with the impressions and reflections of those who grew up in its wake and whose work, childhoods, and memories are all colored by the long shadow that it cast. The Wall in My Head provides a unique view into the change, optimism, and confusion that came with 1989 and examines how each of these has weathered the twenty years since that fateful year.
Highlights within include seminal excerpts from the work of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.
In the latest recommendation for travelers eager to revisit the scenes of the impasse between East and West, the New York Times does a travel piece on biking along the former Iron Curtain.
The piece has some lovely pictures of the areas around the former boundary that are fascinating to look at, and show the effect that twenty years have had on these hotly contested lines of control.
Brian Rose, whose fantastic work is included in The Wall in My Head does a tremendous job of documenting the particular landscape and look of the Iron Curtain, and you can see many of the pictures on his Web site, at The Lost Border
It’s startling to see the ways in which the handprint of the Cold War years is either pressed permanently into countrysides or cityscapes, or eerily removed altogether. The scenes of large swathes of land that have gone to seed as meadows visible from miles above ground have an uncanny quietness to them that is remarkable to look at in Brian’s pictures.
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A few years ago I participated in a design charrette at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The idea was to get landscape architecture students to think of ways to preserve and utilize the trace of the former Iron Curtain border.
I was there to show my images of how the frontier looked during the Cold War years. And a German environmental group presented their proposal for creating an Iron Curtain greenbelt. It seems that at least some of the greenbelt has come to fruition.
The Cold War largely froze development along the East/West German border—farmland was expropriated and a swath of raked earth was cleared even through the densest forest.
If you look for the border on Google Maps or Google Earth, you can still see the scar of the “death strip” winding its way across the countryside.
For me the best book on the Cold War / Iron Curtain / Berlin Wall subject is The Iron Curtain Kid by Oliver Fritz. It covers everything the average person could possibly want to know about the subject in a very entertaining style. 5 stars!