Salts, Sewage, and Sulfurous Air

This chapter addresses a typical borderland environmental problem—transboundary air and water pollution. During the 1970s and 1980s, rivers carried eastern industrial waste and sewage into West Germany; the wind blew sulfur dioxide both ways. Their environmental interdependency forced both German states to the negotiating table, eventually producing the ineffectual Environmental Accords of 1987. The western encounter with eastern pollution through the interface of the inter-German border confronted West German authorities with early signs of East Germany’s dissolution. While they failed to grasp the message, their experience with East German pollution and the futile diplomatic efforts to curb it nonetheless generated the knowledge about the nature and extent of the GDR’s environmental problems that became the prerequisite for the post-1990 ecological restoration of East Germany.

Conclusion

The conclusion argues that the “zonal borderlands” along the Iron Curtain constituted West Germany’s most sensitive geographical space. Each issue that arose in these borderlands—from economic deficiencies to border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a nuclear facility—was magnified by the presence of the most militarized border of its day. Over the course of the 1990s, European integration afforded Germans the privilege of thinking in terms of a borderless Europe. The refugee “crisis” of 2015 marks the moment when the significance of borders returned to German consciousness. In this context, historicizing the Iron Curtain is more important than ever.

Transboundary Natures

This chapter investigates the consequences of the border regime for landscape and wildlife. The ecological impact of the inter-German border has become widely known through the work of a postunification conservation project, the Green Belt. The chapter not only looks at the final ecological footprint of the Iron Curtain as evident in 1989–1990 but considers the effects of the East German border regime on landscape over time. It argues that these effects were neither purely detrimental to nor exclusively beneficial for nature and wildlife; hence neither a narrative of declension nor a narrative of creation adequately captures the dynamic influence of the border regime. This chapter introduces the term “transboundary natures” to refer to the landscapes shaped by the border, a concept that highlights the role of the border in landscape change, regardless of whether such change was embraced by contemporaries as advantageous for or rejected as deleterious to nature.

“Greetings from the Zonal Border”

This chapter considers tourism to the Iron Curtain as a means by which West Germans and their visitors sought to make sense of the global Cold War through local activity. As early as the 1950s, the Iron Curtain attracted curiosity seekers and eventually turned into a well-developed tourist attraction. An elaborate tourist infrastructure emerged on the western side that allowed visitors to peek into socialist East Germany. The Iron Curtain was put on display in a way that prompted East German authorities to make efforts to render such visits less attractive for western tourists. Especially during the 1950s and 1960s, border tourism offered an outlet for West German anti-Communism and was frequently framed as a demand for German unity. The chapter reads border tourism as a skewed form of communication between West and East that stabilized the political and territorial status quo and helped West Germans become accustomed to partition.

The Making of the West German Borderlands, 1945–1955

This chapter explores the economic consequences of the early inter-German border and introduces the economic heterogeneity of the borderlands through snapshots of four localities along the demarcation line. As the tightening demarcation made itself felt, a coalition of borderland advocates pressured the federal government to help prevent their regions from turning into economic backwaters. These lobbying efforts revealed that borderland residents cared less about living in the shadow of the Iron Curtain than about living in the shadow of the “economic miracle” to their west. In their pitch for state aid, borderland advocates declared their regions to be economically, socially, and politically more vulnerable as a result of the Cold War than regions that had “merely” been damaged by the recent war. Their efforts yielded the “zonal borderland aid” program that soon became an integral part of the border regions’ economic and cultural life.

Closing the Nuclear Fuel Cycle at Gorleben?

In 1977, the village of Gorleben in the border county of Lüchow-Dannenberg was nominated as the potential site of a nuclear waste reprocessing and storage facility. This chapter argues that the presence of the Iron Curtain shaped and magnified every aspect of the ensuing siting controversy. In view of discursive patterns conceived in the 1950s that framed the border regions as areas in need of industrial development, Gorleben’s borderland location precipitated its nomination. The siting decision endowed county officials with leverage over the federal government, a newfound power they exercised along the lines of the well-established borderland lobby work. The immediate proximity of Gorleben to the inter-German border also drew the GDR into the siting dispute. Gorleben turned the periphery into the center of the longest-lasting anti-nuclear protest in the Federal Republic and changed its energy future, albeit not in ways that proponents of nuclear energy imagined in the 1970s and 1980s.

The East of the West

This chapter investigates the history of “zonal borderland aid,” a program devised to support the West German border regions. It analyzes the strategies that borderland advocates deployed to entrench this government program for good. By depicting their regions as victimized by the Iron Curtain, they inadvertently generated the perception that the borderlands were backward. Pushing beyond 1990, the chapter addresses the economic consequences of the fall of the border and the widespread hope that the erstwhile periphery would turn into the new center of Germany and Europe. The borderlands became the places where the postunification “cotransformation” was instantly felt. The toolkit of economic aid that had been employed to prop up the borderlands now moved a few miles across the former border: “zonal borderland aid” turned into Reconstruction East, the program charged with rebuilding the economic capacity of former East Germany along capitalist lines.

Introduction

The introduction explains how a study of the volatile inter-German border can afford us fresh perspectives on the history of the “old” Federal Republic. It makes the case for why the Iron Curtain should not only be explored as part of East German and Eastern European history, as is frequently done, but also be interrogated for its tangible consequences for West Germany as well. Addressing current scholarship, the introduction argues that as a historiographical subject, the inter-German border is finally moving out of the shadow of the better known Berlin Wall.