The Border of Borders

Timothy Phillips - Retracing the Iron Curtain: A 3,000-Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War

The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2023

In 2019, writer and historian Timothy Phillips embarked on a 3,000-mile trek along the route of Europe’s postwar dividing line—almost a third was on foot. The trip began in Norway’s far north and ended where Turkey and Azerbaijan meet, and in his engrossing “Retracing the Iron Curtain,” Mr. Phillips uses that journey to tell the story of this brutal “border of borders,” which in the early days after World War II reached much further than is typically recalled.

And so Mr. Phillips shows up in Bornholm, a Danish island in the Baltic, which was still being “liberated” by the Soviets when Churchill spoke of an Iron Curtain. The Soviets eventually left, with conditions—just as there were conditions when they handed back Porkkala, a Finnish peninsula a few miles west of Helsinki that for a decade or so had been an exclave of the Leningrad region. The Soviets departed abruptly, but when the Finns returned home, “it wasn’t so much a case of the coffee still steaming on the stove as of the smoke still rising from the wreckage.”

Both history and geography brought Mr. Phillips to Germany and to roads taken by Kurt Lichtenstein, a West German journalist, more than 60 years ago. In late 1961, Lichtenstein had set out to drive the length of the border between the two Germanies—a border that had, months before, been strengthened by the construction of the Berlin Wall. Eventually Lichtenstein arrived, as Mr. Phillips does, in Zicherie, a village in Lower Saxony.

Over the centuries, Mr. Phillips explains, Zicherie had blended into its neighbor, Böckwitz. But after 1945 Zicherie found itself in what would become West Germany, while Böckwitz was stranded in the future East Germany. In time, these settlements would have a wall of their own, but, in 1961, the physical border could still be relatively easily crossed. A local tells Mr. Phillips that Lichtenstein had been talking to some farmers in the fields on the eastern side when he was spotted by East German guards and shot, falling mortally wounded in the ditch that marked the border.

Lichtenstein was cremated in East Germany. His ashes were mailed to his widow. There are theories that Lichtenstein was singled out (he was a former communist), but Mr. Phillips believes that it was just as likely that he was simply a man in the wrong place, another victim of a merciless system. His was a very 20th-century death, like that of his parents. They had perished in the Holocaust.

As Mr. Phillips travels alongside a largely vanished barrier, he sees some tangible remnants—a watchtower here, a missile silo there. And he succeeds in conveying the everyday barbarism that did so much to sustain the Iron Curtain. Whether at the frontier or behind it there were, one way or another, many, many Lichtensteins, as well as countless lesser examples of cruelty, callousness, repeated reminders of who was in charge. They worked: One woman tells Mr. Phillips about the silence that reigned when border guards carried out their checks on those on trains entering East Germany, a tacit declaration of submission (and something I remember well from a couple of trips to Berlin in the late 1970s).

“Retracing the Iron Curtain” is not in any sense a conventional history of the Cold War. Its coverage is patchy, its course is geographical, rather than chronological, and not a little idiosyncratic. A grim description of Mr. Phillips’s visit to Hohenschönhausen, the Stasi’s main political prison (“where it perfected its trademark approach of committing violence without leaving bruises”) was to be expected. His detailed analysis of a series of paintings that hung in the foyer of East Berlin’s Palace of the Republic, an unlovely building that once housed, among other wonders, East Germany’s parliament, a disco, a bowling alley and 5,000 tons of asbestos, was not.

The author has an eye for a telling yarn, such as that of the countess—“no socialist”—who somehow managed to give the border a nudge that kept her mansion in Italy and out of Yugoslavia. Together with his accounts of the placeshe visits, such stories and the recollections of those he meets produce an excellent, if impressionistic, depiction, not only of the Iron Curtain but also of key elements in Europe’s Cold War and, for that matter, some of what came next.

And, where a different author might recount another stand-off in Berlin, Mr. Phillips describes a less well-known confrontation: In 1968 a substantial Soviet force spent days gathered at the Norwegian border, its tanks’ guns pointed at the lightly defended Norwegian watchtowers. The worst moment was when the tanks opened fire. “It was some small consolation,” writes Mr. Phillips, that they “were only firing blanks.”

For decades, those who lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain generally assumed it would be permanent, and for all his delight that it wasn’t, Mr. Phillips worries that today’s Europe is turning away from “openness and liberty.” For the most part, his concerns are overdone. That countries denied self-determination for so long would want to control their borders or assert their nationhood is neither surprising nor necessarily sinister.

But then there is Russia. Although Mr. Phillips discusses the invasion of Ukraine in a note that begins the book, I would guess that much of “Retracing the Iron Curtain” was written before the war began. In 2019 Mr. Phillips visited Vyborg, a formerly Finnish city close to St. Petersburg. It was all too clear that Vladimir Putin’s invocation of a carefully edited past, backstopped by tightening repression, was having an influence on the population there. “Kolya,” a supporter of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, told Mr. Phillips “with what now feels like prophetic force” that only a major war could bring Mr. Putin down. That prediction, the author felt, seemed “desperately bleak.” Now, however, it looks optimistic.