Books

The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain

by Brian Rose
Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 144 pages, 87 color plates, 2005. $40.

  Building a wall to mark a political boundary and to ensure a separation between people seems like an anachronistic undertaking. It smacks of the fortified cities of the Middle Ages, although the method of protecting a population from attackers by constructing walls around a settlement is far more ancient. With the advent of military hardware capable of breaching such walls, as well as modern forms of transportation easily able to soar above them, fortifying walls would appear to have been outmoded as a defensive strategy. Yet, as Brian Rose's book The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain shows, 20th-century warfare and air transport did not spell the end of the wall as a political tool.
  Nor has the new millennium brought the death of the wall as a barrier between people, as has been demonstrated by the recent construction of the "grotesque, hopeless barrier that Israel is erecting between itself and the people of Palestine," to quote from the book's foreword by Anthony Bailey. From 1948, when Winston Churchill described the line "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," which demarcated a sphere of "Soviet influ-ence," until the collapse of the Soviet Union, the border between East and West was consistently referred to as an "iron curtain."
  As Rose writes, "Since the Iron Curtain was as much a political construct as a real barrier, its geography was and is often unclear to people. The Berlin Wall was only a small part of the system of fortifications that extended nearly all the way across Central Europe." As Rose's photographs demonstrate, the Iron Curtain was in many places represented by mere wire fences, albeit overseen by armed guards, but in dividing the two halves of Berlin took on a much more substantial form. The Berlin Wall began being chipped away in 1989, but its profound impact on the city is documented in the photographs Rose took between 1985 and 1989.
   The strangeness of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall is beautifully represented by Rose in several ways. His views of the German countryside show daily life-people sitting in a café, farmers haying, for example-in the shadow of walls and fences running through the middle ground with guard towers behind them. Such images illustrate the ubiquity of surveillance in the lives of the people of a divided Europe. In other pictures, Rose shows the strange accommodations made to the wall in the forms of sudden dead-end streets, severed public transportation lines that have to loop away from the boundary, and urban blocks sliced through by the barrier. Rose makes strange again what had evidently become a fact of life, that the boundary between East and West had been given material form with little concern for the ways in which it divided the countryside, the cities, and the people themselves.