Yuliya Komska. The Icon Curtain

Recent Cold War scholarship has examined the roles of everyday West Germans in shaping the Iron Curtain in locations beyond the Berlin Wall. In doing so, this scholarship (such as works by Edith Sheffer, Andrew Demshuk, Sagi Schaefer, and Astrid M. Eckert) has identified the late 1940s and the 1950s as a pivotal period. In this vein, Yuliya Komska’s The Icon Curtain: The Cold War’s Quiet Border focuses on the role of Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia following World War II in transforming the Sudeten region’s West German–Czech borderlands from the periphery into the center of Cold War conflict. Because imaginings of the Bavarian/Bohemian border and forests had a long history, Komska suggests that the reactions of expellees and local Germans to the developing Iron Curtain in these borderlands differed from those along the inter-German border. Expertly applying the methods of cultural studies to the topic, Komska provides a rich analysis of the “prayer wall,” a collection of architectural features, natural monuments, and ritual sites, running parallel to the still not fully formed Iron Curtain, that served to mark the eastern border of the West (4–5).

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cold war · German · Icon · Iron Curtain · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law