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CHAPTER 1 Introduction Standing on the shoreline Growing up on the east coast of Sweden a walk on the beach was like a treasure hunt where washed up plastic bottles or cans with Russian writing were like messages from another world. I could not see this other world but I was told that it was very different from my own. I did not know what the Iron Curtain was back then but the Baltic Sea most certainly felt like a big barrier in which Russian submarines would occasionally take a ‘wrong turn’ and surface a bit too close for comfort, a big barrier that separated ‘us’ from ‘them’ and which was to colour my views of Eastern and Western Europe. Years later I was working as a Heritage Consultant in London. Following guidelines such as Institute for Archaeologists (IFA) guidelines and best practice documents from English Heritage, I worked on Desk Based Assessments, Conservation Plans and Environmental Impact Assessments. I directed fieldwork to mitigate the negative impacts of roadwork, new pipelines or other construction projects. Together with my colleagues we were looking out for the heritage of our past and making sure it was preserved for future generations, if not in situ then at least through records. There was, however, little discussion in how this heritage had come to be. What factors and processes are involved in making these sites that we investigate What has come to fascinate me more and more whilst carrying out the work on my thesis are the processes involved in creating the past that we see around us. Heritage does not just happen; it is created and recreated as part of our history writing. To an archaeologist it should probably not come as a surprise how important the material is to the way we view and write our history, but somehow it still did. In this thesis I look closer at how a material part of our history that we see around us today has come to be the way it is. By looking at how the material of the Iron Curtain has developed 15
AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN over time, how it looks today and how it is viewed by people around it I hope to demonstrate one example of the kind of processes in which a materiality can be formed in history writing and in creating, or not creating as the case may be, a heritage. The materiality of the Iron Curtain The aim of this thesis is to explore what knowledge about the Iron Curtain can be reached through the material traces it has left behind as well as the effects these remains have on people around them. The aim is also to contribute to the continuous discussion and methodological development of the archaeology of the contemporary past. Why use the Iron Curtain as material Whenever you deal with Cold War history the term Iron Curtain is never far away. Sentences such as “behind the Iron Curtain” or “after the fall of the Iron Curtain” are often used. But what was it really When I had just started as a PhD student I explained to a friend of mine what my research was going to be about. He looked quite concerned and then said “But you know that the Iron Curtain never actually existed It was a metaphor.” This inconsistency, the paradox of the real and imagined Iron Curtain is what makes it such an interesting material study. On the one hand there was the metaphor of the Iron Curtain: an idea of a Europe divided by two political blocs. On the other there were a series of heavily militarised borders running through Central Europe physically dividing it. Do they tell the same story If not, does one story take precedence when we write our Cold War history How do the stories that emerge from the metaphor and the materials fit within the local and world history Another reason why this is such interesting material is that it is now in the process of becoming heritage. In some places it has already come a long way, in others it may never be seen as heritage at all. What are the processes involved in this ‘becoming’ But maybe most importantly, it is a very interesting material in itself which is well worth studying. Seeing that the term Iron Curtain is frequently used and well known to a lot of people in the western world, its physicality is little understood. Studies have been made in Germany of the materiality of the Inner German Border (Sheffer 2007 and 2008, Rottman 2008) but generally studies have mainly focussed on the social consequences inherent in a divided country. There have also been archaeological studies 16
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Page 8 and 9: Contents Acknowledgements 11 CHAPTE
Page 10: The end of a journey 212 Sammanfatt
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Page 30 and 31: 1: INTRODUCTION World War II dividi
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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
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Figure 16: Postcard of the newly op
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402 Kojsko Hum 402 THE OSIM
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Figure 50: Map demonstrating the bo
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CHAPTER 5 Case Study 2 The Czech/Au
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5: CASE STUDY 2: THE CZECH/AUSTRIAN
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Figure 55: Bunker near the crossing
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Figure 59: Military map from 1980 o
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Figure 77-78: Painting inside the f
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CHAPTER 6 An archaeology of the Iro
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6: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTA
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Figure 102: Fence and Watch Tower a
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Sammanfattning (Summary in Swedish)
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SAMMANFATTNING En fysisk metafor I
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SAMMANFATTNING komst och kunskapsf
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SAMMANFATTNING Fältstudier av läm
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SAMMANFATTNING som försöker ta si
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SAMMANFATTNING mets dilemma”. Han
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Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations
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33. Sofie Bedford, Islamic activism
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67. Anne Kaun, Civic Experiences an
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Stockholm Studies in Archaeology Se
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29. LINDGREN, Christina. 2004. Män
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The Iron Curtain was seen as the di
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