The Icon Curtain: The Cold War's Quiet Border 9780226154220

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The Icon Curtain

The Icon Curtain The Cold War’s Quiet Border

y u l i ya komsk a the universit y of chicago press

chicago and london

yuliya komska is assistant professor of German studies at Dartmouth College. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-15419-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-15422-0 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/978022615422.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Komska, Yuliya, author. The icon curtain : the Cold War’s quiet border / Yuliya Komska. pages : illustrations ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-15419-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-15422-0 (e-book) 1. Sudeten Germans—History—20th century. 2. Bohemian Forest—Description and travel. 3. Travelers’ writings, German—History and criticism—20th century. 4. Bohemian Forest Region—Church history—20th century. 5. Sudeten Germans— Religion. 6. Bohemian Forest—In art. 7. Czechoslovakia—History—1945– 1992. 8. Germany (West)—Boundaries—Czechoslovakia—History—20th century. 9. Czechoslovakia—Boundaries—Germany (West)—History—20th century. 10. Cold War. I. Title. DD78.S77K66 2015 943′.34087—dc23 2014016858 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents List of Illustrations

vi

List of Abbreviations viii Introduction 1 chapter 1. Conditions: Ruins of the Cold War 32 chapter 2. Cornerstones: Iconoclasm and the Making of the Prayer Wall 66 chapter 3. Infrastructure: Civilian Border Travel and Travelogues 125 chapter 4. Uses: Visual Nostalgia at the Prayer Wall Epilogue: Tragic Frames 234 Acknowledgments 241 List of Archives 245 Notes

247

Index

285

179

Illustrations Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8.

Figure 9. Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 17.

The Iron Curtain / 2 The Czechoslovak–West German border with the prayer wall to its west / 3 “View from the market-place to the ‘Bindergasse.’ Ruins upon ruins” / 43 Oswald Voh, Lost Heimat / 49 “Carlsbad today” / 54 “The upper and the lower ‘Steingasse.’ It is forbidden to enter there on account of the downfalling houses” / 59 “Barricades . . . before Eger” / 61 “Barricades, loaded electric wires, watch towers and the plowed dead zone separate the people of Egerland from their inherited home country” / 62 “A shaking contemporary image that hits the Christians in the whole world” / 67 Adolf Günther, Untitled, 1963 / 76 The “expelled Madonna,” Mitterfi rmiansreut chapel / 85 Kurt Scherbaum, the “mutilated Savior,” 1951 / 100 The “mutilated Savior,” Waldsassen Basilica / 108 Hans Zirlik, the “mutilated Savior,” undated, ca. 1960 / 116 Cover of an Easter prayer leaflet, Waldsassen Basilica, undated, after 1989 / 119 “Just to See Heimat Means Great Happiness to Many,” 1951 / 145 Sepp Skalitzky and friend on Osser, 1980 / 148

illustrations

vii

Figure 18. “More than a thousand members of the AckermannGemeinde and the ‘Junge Aktion’ arrived in three cars and 25 buses,” 1955 / 150 Figure 19. “The glance from Dreisesselberg can roam even farther,” 1955 / 155 Figure 20. Granite post at the “Center of Europe,” Tillen, near Neualbenreuth / 160 Figure 21. A page from a West German family photo album, Bayerischer Wald Urlaub Juli 1960 / 199 Figure 22. “Look into the Heimat at the Tilly Earthworks,” 1962 / 200 Figure 23. “The Koch family with the car at the threshold to the Heimat, Easter 1960” / 201 Figure 24. “Plan is visible to a naked eye,” 1966 / 203 Figure 25. “Heimat is there,” 1962 / 204 Figure 26. After Adolf Huska, Look across the Border to Heimat, 1953 / 213 Figure 27. Present-day church exterior with the adjacent lookout tower, St. Anna, Mähring / 217 Figure 28. Present-day exterior of the Heimat Tower, Neualbenreuth / 225 Figure 29. “An odd-looking image. A farmer from Neualbenreuth tills the field with his horse, while one car after the other, packed with nostalgic fellow countrymen, streams toward the nearby lookout tower at Tillen,” 1965 / 227 Figure 30. “The lookout tower with a little topping-out branch,” 1960 / 228 Figure 31. Josef Rauscher, The Gaze into the Heimat, 1966 / 231 Figure 32. “Eger,” a window plaque, Heimat Tower, Neualbenreuth / 232

Abbreviations BBP EZ HbPW RFE SdL SdZ

Bavarian Border Police Egerer Zeitung Heimatbrief für die Kreise Plan-Weseritz und Tepl-Petschau Radio Free Europe Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft Sudetendeutsche Zeitung

Introduction Nature’s Cold War Amphitheater

A

mong an adolescent Winston Spencer Churchill’s toy theaters— cardboard replicas of real-life scenic art mass-produced for home use—one was particularly memorable. By most accounts, the best-selling playroom adaptation of Isaac Pocock’s melodrama The Miller and His Men (1812), set on the “banks of a river on the borders of a forest in Bohemia” and probably inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers (1781), captivated the youth.1 This was small wonder, since its ominous backdrop stood out even in the colorful world of paper Victoriana. As on other occasions, the East-Central European landscape highlighted the dramatic tension of the plot to be recreated in the fragile land of make-believe. Admittedly, Pocock’s Bohemia, unlike its counterpart in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, did not boast a coastline of its own. But it offered no shortage of “dark nights, bad roads, hail, rain, [and] assassins” to besiege the travelers who ventured to set foot on a terrain so obviously inhospitable. 2 As he moved delicate paper characters along the cardboard scenery of drenched ravines, the young British prime minister-to-be could not have suspected that decades later a continental divide would cut through these very woods—the Bohemian Forest (known as Böhmerwald in German and Šumava in Czech)—and would spell the end of Central Europe’s largest continuous primeval forest and water reservoir. 3 And yet this is precisely what happened. By the early 1950s, with the advent of the strategic barrier known as the Iron Curtain, the Bohemian Forest that had fascinated Schiller, Pocock, and the young Churchill ceased to exist. A qualitatively different physical and imagined conjunction between border and forest took its place—a conjunction that this book investigates.

2

Introduction

FIGURE 1. The Iron Curtain. From US Central Intelligence Agency, Central Europe Transportation Map (Washington, DC: CIA, 1987).

A sylvan legacy, it turns out, lived on along the readily accessible West German side of the barrier to Czechoslovakia, between Bavarian Waldsassen in the north and Passau in the south. Of course, the actual Bohemian Forest remained behind the Iron Curtain. But the preoccupations with it migrated westward. They followed in the footsteps of the area’s one-time ethnic (Sudeten) German residents, the forest’s self-appointed caretakers, who had been expelled in the wake of 1945. Having settled down predominantly in the Federal Republic’s Catholic south, the Sudeten Germans soon began projecting their forest allegiances onto the

Introduction

3

barrier that now made up the country’s southeastern border—and thus onto the East-West rift. Their efforts to intervene in the construction of the border’s landscape reflect the extraordinary scale of creative civilian responses to the division of a continent. Impossible to describe with official documents alone, such reactions took on varied spoken, written, visual, and architectural forms—the main focus of this book. They fi rst made their way into oral traditions: tales,

FIGURE 2. The Czechoslovak–West German border with the prayer wall to its west. From Antonín Skovajsík, C ˇ eskoslovenská Socialistická Republika: Obecneˇ zemeˇpisná mapa (Bratislava: Kartografické Nakladatelství, 1969). Courtesy of Kartografie Praha.

4

Introduction

sagas, and anecdotes remained a powerful outlet for long- established forest affi nities.4 Yet word-of-mouth stories hardly stood by themselves. Little by little, elements of these tales infi ltrated the printed page, shaping the fictions and half-fictions that confronted the new confluence of border and forest. Accounts of latter-day religious miracles, Iron Curtain travelogues, and poems with such deadpan titles as “At the Border” captured the emerging Cold War landscape, and accompanying illustrations—above all photographs, prints, and drawings—rendered the setting visible for readers far and wide. And if that was not enough, the new folklore then escaped the confi nes of the printed page to condition the landscape’s physical appearance. On site, the forest imagery preoccupied those charged with civilian construction projects to the border’s west. It permeated discussions of the building materials to be used, the location of the new man-made structures in their natural setting, and the views that these would proffer once they were completed. Thus, the Iron Curtain, no less than a military stronghold, also became a site of bustling creative activity. Clearly, the civilian engineers of the partition—in this case, the Sudeten German expellees and some Bavarian locals—concerned themselves with more than traditions frozen in time. Instead of simply retelling the stories of yore, they adapted the local forest lore to the area’s ongoing geopolitical changes. Staunch Catholics and churchgoers, our protagonists recorded instances of Eastern Bloc iconoclasm, weaving the ensuing legends of defaced images into the fabric of popular piety along the West’s margin. Pilgrims and tourists, they revised regional traffic patterns and helped sculpt the border’s contours by buttressing its western side with new Catholic shrines and their secular extensions. Obsessive amateur and professional writers and artists, they coerced their perceptions of the overlap between border and forest into pictorial or literary genres—some established and others without precedent. Poets of varied talent and caliber, from the forest’s mountainous heights they sung praises to overcoming division, fraught with hopes of a German return to the Czech lands. Collectively, over the confl ict’s four decades, their efforts produced the so-called “prayer wall,” the Cold War limit’s civilian articulation that has thus far remained unexplored. Under their auspices, the project that began as a religious bulwark against “godless Communism” evolved into a progressively more inclusive reference point for versatile artistic aspirations and a substantive part of the Iron Curtain itself—the part that still stands to this day.

Introduction

5

Anything but rhetorical, this civilian rampart took on a concrete physical shape. Consolidated between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s, the prayer wall was made up of a chain of new sites—chapels and lookout towers constructed to replicate their destroyed counterparts in the East—that punctuated the segment of the Iron Curtain considered here. Along its course, recent additions complemented already existing historic landmarks, from Austro-Hungarian land-survey posts to Bohemian Forest attractions hailed in the prose of the important nineteenthcentury author and “cultural forester,” Adalbert Stifter. 5 The prayer wall thus not only mirrored the Cold War present, but it also linked it to the area’s far-reaching pasts. The following chapters shed light on the origins, development, and uses of the resulting continuum. This work is the fi rst monograph to approach the landscape of the Iron Curtain outside Berlin from the vantage point of cultural studies, accounting for the prayer wall as the foremost display of the midcentury concurrence between border and forest. In the Cold War, I argue, these two quintessentially German obsessions—border and forest—fueled by the creative efforts outlined above, entered into a symbiotic relationship on an unprecedented scale.6 Focused on the place of unmatched international significance during this time, the confl icting images of the unruly, contradictory, or restorative wilderness, fundamental to Germany’s aesthetic, ideological, and ecological consciousness for nearly two centuries, had an important role to play. They mediated the efforts to represent—assimilate, resist, or simply ponder—mid-twentieth-century division. For this section of the barrier at least, “cultural manifestations” were a reflection of the border’s actual setting.7 They sprung up in its immediate vicinity, even as the Iron Curtain was descending upon the forest’s already “genuinely political space,” real or contrived.8 This overlap of culture and politics was complicated by the fact that the Bohemian Forest is more than an ecosystem. It is also a metaphor for a tangled web of pilgrimage routes, hiking paths, and narrative plotlines. It is a landscape cultural no less than natural.9 The tension between these two characteristics defi ned perceptions of the area’s appearance, described in an eighteenth-century geographical survey as a “natural amphitheater [of] formidable proportions.”10 The magnitude of its expanse likewise veered between fact and contrivance. In the mid-twentieth century, the actual Bohemian Forest extended only sixty miles to the east of the 220-mile-long border between Czechoslovakia and West Germany.

6

Introduction

Yet the influence of the much more vague earlier contours of this mountain range reached further into the imaginary of space and time. Across space, the forest’s echoes resonated as far west and northwest as the adjacent Bavarian and Upper Palatine Forests, or even the Fichtelgebirge, especially since the boundaries between these, as I detail later, had been porous for centuries. Across time, the area’s patrimony—its folklore, broadly defi ned—stretched to embrace all manner of men and vermin. Mythical forest creatures rubbed shoulders with characters from nineteenth-century nationalist borderland novels (Grenzlandromane); with such doyens of German literature as Goethe, taking a well-deserved respite at Bohemian resorts; with homesick maidens depicted in the style of Stifter; and with archetypal border personages of our times: smugglers, day laborers, and border guards. The Cold War– era custodians of the area’s legacies tried to make sense of this menagerie. From their viewpoint, the Cold War was not only a confl ict between East and West, it was a pinnacle in the long history of the making and unmaking of modernity’s borderland cultures and ideologies. In this history, our protagonists set out to write a chapter of their own. Working together on the prayer wall helped them quell their frequently embittered competition for living quarters, food, and fi nancial assistance in the Bavarian backwater—one of West Germany’s economic calamity zones. Necessity dictated this chapter, on a par with choice. By the early 1950s, the Bohemian Forest’s once expansive stage, now fractured between East and West, was poised to become a mise-en-scène in the new standoff’s European theater. But far removed from the real conflagrations of the era, it turned out to be a relatively uneventful set piece.11 Rugged yet serene, its local setting between Czechoslovakia and West Germany did not convey the sense of suspenseful human drama associated with the period. Representations of the forest were thus employed to enhance the impact of the region’s physical properties and draw attention to the new protective role of West Germany’s periphery, so much so that the actual landscape and its depictions became locked in a tandem that defi ned the border as much as it defi nes the narrative of this book. If “amphitheater,” as the word’s etymology tells us, is a place for viewing on both sides, then the West German rim of the Bohemian Forest certainly lived up to this defi nition. In gazing eastward and westward from the borderland’s heights, fi rsthand impressions of division, embellished or not, could be funneled into artifacts. In these works, the Cold War landscape was more than just “the backdrop in which the action takes

Introduction

7

place,”12 it was part of the performance itself—one that kept amateur and professional writers, poets, and artists coming back. The main conceit of this study is that these artifacts began to cement an icon curtain—which would eventually become the prayer wall—even before its Iron counterpart could take proper shape. At stake, of course, is more than a pun. The term “icon” here carries two meanings. The fi rst is literal, referring to the religious artifacts fundamental to this border’s earliest stories. The second is figurative, describing representations in general. Particularly decisive here are those works with a local pedigree, distinct from comparable artifacts conceived elsewhere. The tension between idiom local and remote resonates in each of the four chapters and comes down to a plain distinction. Throughout the West, miles away from the fault line, anticommunist propaganda graphically depicted the Iron Curtain as “a strip of communist-controlled hell on earth.”13 And although thousands internalized such violent imagery and willingly visualized the resulting tragedies, on site, this hell was not as readily apparent as it was on propaganda posters. The Czechoslovak– West German border is fascinating precisely for its ambivalent relationship to such vignettes of Communist hell and for its visitors’ perceived need to negotiate such ambivalence. In this regard, the forest’s legacies proved indispensable. This is not to say that the border’s Cold War–era history lacked spectacular incidents. In one instance, a train fi lled with dozens of Czech refugees, some willing accomplices and others unwitting participants, raced right through the fortifications at full speed. In another, an inventive Bohemian engineer smuggled his entire family into Bavaria in a self-made armored vehicle, subsequently dubbed “the freedom tank.” As elsewhere along the Iron Curtain, arrests of spies and Eastern Bloc escapees were routine on both sides. Reports of gunfi re heard to the border’s east commonly made it into the next day’s Western papers. Yet civilian visitors (and thanks to some two million homesick Sudeten German expellees residing in the Federal Republic, their steady stream of callers was a hallmark along this border for decades) saw little evidence of such drama. The “freedom trains” and “freedom tanks” departed to tour the Western world as moveable proof of capitalism’s triumph over communism, and few traces of their existence lingered on site. Grass grew over the severed train tracks and rains washed away the caterpillar markings. The West German authorities, for their part, made only limited at-

8

Introduction

tempts at exhibiting the border’s effects on souvenirs or at information points, as they would do along the dividing line between two Germanys. Civilians, consequently, had a vacuum to fi ll, and they fi lled it with works where fiction had precedence over fact. Hidden in the forested hills, this was a quiet border where realism prevailed over reality. Of course, political scientists have long used the term “realism” to denote pragmatic, power-focused statesmanship, and the term “tragic” to expose the hubris of such an approach. Yet in the present context, as I elaborate in the epilogue’s culminating discussion, these words carry very different meanings. “Realism” refers not to Realpolitik but to a fictive way of ordering the world. “Tragic,” for its part, alludes to the exaggerated pitch of such renditions, often harnessed to drive home the urgency of a war perceived by many as a “nonevent.”14 In a nutshell, along the prayer wall the sum of utterances “justified by their referent alone,” as realist works have been described, played a role far greater and more lasting than the referents themselves.15 For the protagonists in this book, contributing to what Roland Barthes has termed “the reality effect” possessed its own allure. It endowed them with a sense of agency they may not have otherwise had, by promoting them from West Germany’s have-nots to the country’s Cold Warrior vanguard.

Iron Curtains and Their Long Histories The Icon Curtain not only explains how such motivations propelled a wide range of creative responses to the conflict’s quiet border; the book also revisits and, in some cases, revises several dominant historical assumptions about the Cold War divide in general. Above all, it questions the conventional wisdom that the Iron Curtain was a fault line without precedent or “an established genealogy.”16 To be sure, in strategic terms, it was “a border like no other.”17 For the most part, however, it did not materialize in the middle of nowhere, being grafted, with some exceptions, onto borders previously in existence. A “persistent frontier,” to borrow Caitlin Murdock’s term, the line between Czechoslovakia and West Germany allows us to reconsider the Iron Curtain as a deep cultural reservoir rather than a strategic fence or mental barrier.18 While “contextualiz[ing] the border in a long history of Central European strife” may indeed take us on an unwanted detour, tracing the partition’s

Introduction

9

relationship to cultural traditions, be it in writing, art, or religious worship, is anything but redundant.19 By picking up the lens of the longue durée—deep genealogy—not usually employed by those who write about the Iron Curtain, I do not intend to tear down the foremost Cold War symbol or to debunk the border’s historical peculiarity. There is no doubt that the Iron Curtain bore the stamp of time—it is just that time had left more than one stamp on the border’s course. Therefore, the more or less unbroken line on the map, foreshadowed in Churchill’s “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” had had a highly discontinuous, site-specific history and meaning that had produced what was, in every sense, a “multiplex border-line.” 20 And to follow the geographer Doreen Massey’s laconic formula, “Without multiplicity, no space.” 21 To an outside observer, the barrier may indeed appear as a continuum of barbed wire, a no man’s land with some structural variations. Yet on-the-ground realities, as Edith Sheffer has convincingly argued in the context of the borderland’s everyday life, were never that simple: economic, geographic, and social circumstances varied widely from one segment to another. Yet the divide’s discrete lengths were not just differently fortified, patrolled, or populated; they were also, this book suggests, in the grip of divergent cultural-historical forces that reached back beyond twentieth-century confl icts and their aftermath. Each part of the 4,350-mile-long Iron Curtain possessed its own past that cast a shadow on perceptions of its Cold War present. This pertains to the previously nonexistent, or only regionally significant, inter-German border as much as it does to any portion of the divide that overlapped with an already established national boundary, or with several national boundaries. It is relevant to the West, where the border was readily accessible, no less than to the East, where it was a highly restricted zone. No two sections had identical effects on either the people or the landscapes in which they moved, real or imagined. No two segments possessed identical affective or iconic valences. What is more, the line between Bohemia and Bavaria, characterized by a vast iconic surplus going at least as far back as the nineteenth century, qualifies not only as fruitful ground for exploring the far-reaching genealogies of the relatively recently drawn partitions. It also affords an Anglophone researcher an opportunity to move beyond the confi nes of the inter-German border. Although recent English-language studies of

10

Introduction

the Iron Curtain have rightly criticized the near-exclusive earlier emphasis on Berlin “as the icon of Cold War confl ict,” 22 their continuing focus on the border between the two German states has produced another similarly privileged site. 23 Just as the Berlin Wall was once a synecdoche for the entire divide, “Germany’s Iron Curtain” has become equated with the border between the fragmented country’s East and West.24 Yet for that divided nation’s western half, the partition did not end in the environs of Hof or Coburg but continued southward, into the areas where we are about to set foot. The southward extension, as we will soon see, did not simply spell more of the same. Its landscape, its well-publicized forest myths, and the priorities of both locals and visitors set it apart. These wide-ranging particularities throw into relief not only the East-West contrasts—the main focus of scholarly scrutiny until now—but also the dissimilarities between the border’s western stretches in countries like Germany, Austria, or Finland. Only by registering and articulating the distinctions between such discrete segments can we facilitate our understanding of the Iron Curtain as a set of “regional subsystems” that once structured “the highly differentiated and uneven landscape of the Cold War battlefield.” 25 The Icon Curtain contributes to this process even if it remains an incomplete account, by necessity focused on the West—the home of the prayer wall. And here is how. Up until now, scholars of the Cold War divide have been predominantly concerned with explaining why a given section of the Iron Curtain was representative of its entirety. The Icon Curtain pursues an opposite trajectory. It insists that each such part was exceptional, casting doubt on the feasibility of a totalizing cultural or even political history of the divide. By putting forth the fi rst English-language account of the Cold War border’s lesser-known section, I posit that the Iron Curtain did not exist. While Sheffer’s work questions the adjective “Iron” as “misleading” because it presupposes the barrier’s sudden rise and solid structure, 26 in this book I take issue with the certainty of the defi nite article that introduces the coinage. Some day such skepticism may allow us to ask what, exactly, besides the nebulous bloc mentalities, could have made westerners on both sides of the Atlantic so receptive to the phrase “the Iron Curtain” in the fi rst place. Until that day, thinking about the many Iron Curtains can help us avoid perpetuating already abundant Cold War stereotypes.

Introduction

11

Therefore, when Bohemia’s forests take center stage here, it is not to suggest that some Iron Curtain segments tell us more about how Central Europeans processed the Cold War than others. Rather, it is to suggest that the form and content of their respective stories are qualitatively different in ways that merit serious consideration. 27 To highlight such differences, The Icon Curtain issues a plea for a comparative or even contrastive approach to the Cold War barrier’s course. In the service of such an approach, one need not always traverse continents, although examples of twentieth-century barriers the world over will undoubtedly prove illuminating. 28 Often enough, a look next door suffices. Vis-à-vis the betterstudied inter-German border, the once ill-defi ned, blurry outlines of the Bohemian Forest, arguably chiseled into their presently divided shape only by the descent of the Iron Curtain, are an example of such contrastive proximity. This area’s particular appeal derives from the extent to which its landscape permeated the works of its prolific Sudeten German caretakers both before and during the Cold War. Not only did the Sudeten Germans have “an intimate connection with the space which the border formation process gradually transformed,”29 they were the uniquely extensive practitioners in these forested borderlands for over a century, fi rst in the East and later, during the Cold War, in the West. Their physical rootedness and the intensity of their engagement allowed them to articulate the Cold War fault line as a question about the intersection of space and culture as well as historical and ideological forces, rather than as a geopolitical, military, or mental certainty. It is, perhaps, off-putting that the language of this study does not reflect the above suggestions more immediately. Throughout the text, I refer to the Cold War border by using the defi nite, not the indefi nite, article. Nor do I dispense with the monolithic-sounding singular forms, such as “the divide,” “the barrier,” or “the rift.” My decision to forego any drastic terminological overhaul is best explained by the assumption that the differentiated content with which these words have been invested here is more important than their form. Hopefully, readers can follow this premise more easily than if they were forced to adjust to awkward neologisms or parenthetical plural endings. Throughout the book, therefore, invocations of the above singular nouns, unless otherwise noted or obvious from the context, will be geographically specific. They will pertain to the Czechoslovak–West German border—a border here taken to be episodically symptomatic, but not representative, of the entire divide.

12

Introduction

Future scholars may decide to iron out any inconsistencies in the vocabulary, should these prove bothersome. Presently, however, the most pressing issues will be methodological rather than terminological. Let me now contextualize a few of these issues vis-à-vis the current body of scholarship.

Beyond the “Mental Wall” Existing studies of the Cold War barrier in both East and West, decisive for molding the direction of this book, have been historical, sociological, or anthropological. They have addressed the border’s strategic fortifications, demographic changes in the adjacent eastern areas, incidents and casualties, the divide’s role in state-building processes, everyday interactions, local contributions to the border’s enforcement, and aspects of material culture related to the divide. 30 Such studies have been invaluable for asserting the border’s dynamic development, gradual consolidation, local roots, and affi rmation by the West rather than only the East. Thanks to them, we now know that the divide was less unilaterally imposed, more porous, and more rooted in people’s malleable mindsets than previously assumed. They have drawn on state records, oral histories, or commemorative initiatives to flesh out the variegated complexities of “the Cold War experience” on both sides. 31 The Icon Curtain builds on these important perspectives. But it also marks a substantive disciplinary departure from them as it begins to close gaps in our understanding by incorporating such fields as visual, literary, and religious studies. It provides the fi rst concerted look at the actual Iron Curtain through representations rather than events, through genres and forms rather than experiences. It is a close reading of contextualized fictions, not a search for facts. Although borders have long been recognized as prime “sites of creative cultural production,” and although the Iron Curtain is widely considered to be “the most notorious border in the world,” thus far, scholars in the humanities have had remarkably little to say about the Cold War divide outside Germany’s present-day capital. 32 To an extent, the subject’s development in an emerging field explains this lacuna. Yet it is only part of the story. The perception that the Iron Curtain beyond Berlin was a fact of provincial life characterized, as Sagi Shafer points out, by the scarcity of documentation, 33 let alone cultural production, still in-

Introduction

13

forms the choice of sources and methods adopted for its study. And yet, by arguing the contrary, this book does not propose that we ought to reconsider the Cold War borderlands as central. Scholars have already done that by invoking the Iron Curtain, “not as the remote periphery . . . , but as a troubled artery,” and by capturing it as an epicenter where the “long peace” had continuously verged on escalation into war. 34 Instead, The Icon Curtain describes how pulling together resources to shape peripheries into centers topped the agenda of the border’s visitors and residents already in the confl ict’s early years. In these efforts, creative forms proved instrumental. Turning to them here is an invitation to move beyond Peter Schneider’s highly influential coinages “the mental Wall” or “the Wall in our heads.”35 Cold War–era civilians, inasmuch as we can speak of such a category, masterminded more than the division’s intangible psychic construction. Of course, the period’s dividing lines started out as “virtual reality.”36 Yet to relegate their proliferation to human interiors alone would mean to obscure some of the most powerful vehicles for their successes and failures: visual representations, literary texts, religious cults, and the physical environment. The point is precisely that divisions could not be contained in people’s heads. Released by way of mimesis— broadly defi ned as a “metaliterary anthropological concept designating a specifically human ability, which is characteristic . . . of observations and representations of the world, whether the activity takes place in empirical life or in a fiction”—imaginings did not linger in the mind endlessly. They entered into acts of “symbolic worldmaking,” where boundaries between fact and fiction were particularly muddled. 37 Their adopted forms of expression, to quote Barthes, “cannot be considered as a simple instrument . . . of thought.”38 More than a mere venue for voicing opinions and sentiments, they referenced, explicitly or implicitly, established canons of cultural practice. These ranged from popular piety to realist literature, from Christian iconography to Romantic painting. As Jonathan Hess argues in his exploration of the middlebrow, such creations gathered strength from claims of ostensible proximity to recognized artistic forms. The latter validated the frequently pedestrian content and style of the former. Rather than discount the middlebrow for its questionable artistic pretenses, we ought to consider, Hess suggests, the cultural labor that such a corpus can perform for its consumers and their environments. 39 What constituted such labor in the present context? Along the mid-

14

Introduction

continental barrier, the artifacts that arose from the overlap between forest and border (I use Martha Langford’s term “vernacular”—born out of the everyday experience of viewing and making art—to describe them40), not only aided civilians in carving peripheries into centers, these works were instrumental in helping their authors and publics develop vocabularies to address the Cold War as a standoff that imploded familiar categories—as a “source of historical puzzlement.”41 They allowed people to relate the new “cold” confl ict’s mutable local course to what they had previously associated with war and border. We can best describe such efforts not in reference to fi nished products in possession of certain qualities, but to the open-ended processes of meaning production and canon manipulation. Thus, at stake in the construction of the prayer wall are not distinct works of art, but rather the “aesthetic activity” itself.42 Just like the space that had inspired it, this activity spanned decades. The passage of time made one main change manifest: the incremental intensification of tragic realism. Before turning to my discussion of the increments leading to this crescendo, in the ensuing chapters, let us first map the coordinates of that space—fi rst political, then human-ecological.

The Border The border between Bohemia and Bavaria, or, between 1945 and 1990, Czechoslovakia and West Germany, has been one of the oldest on the Continent. Carefully negotiated markings have punctuated its course since 1764, and historic continuity has been one of its defi ning features.43 In this regard, the period between 1938 and 1945, when Hitler’s Germany annexed Czechoslovakia’s perimeter—known as the Sudetenland—stands out as an exception. But even if this interlude may well have been the fi rst formalized instance of the border’s dismantling, the idea itself was not new. Since the late nineteenth century, the progressively more nationally conscious German speakers on both sides frequently opted not to consider the border as divisive.44 They crossed it as merchants, pilgrims, or hikers. They wished it away as political activists, folklorists, or local historians. From their perspective, it was only the polarizing circumstances of the mid-twentieth century that ruptured the cross-border infrastructure and physically set the divide apart from its sylvan environs.45 Between 1945 and 1948, the forced departure of Czechoslovakia’s Su-

Introduction

15

deten Germans, once 80 to 90 percent of the borderlands’ residents, accelerated these processes.46 Beginning in May 1945, decrees of the president of the Republic (the Beneš Decrees) disenfranchised the state’s minorities tainted by collaboration with the Nazi regime. The two to three million Sudeten Germans, who had overwhelmingly welcomed Hitler’s troops and administrators in October 1938, were the most obvious target group. Consequently, hundreds of German-populated towns and villages on Bohemia’s fringes had been forcibly emptied—some temporarily, until Czech, Slovak, or Roma settlers were permitted to move in from the interior, and others for good.47 Only about 200,000 Sudeten Germans, mainly spouses in mixed marriages with Czechs or Slovaks, individuals with confi rmed leftist credentials, or experts invaluable for postwar reconstruction, were permitted to stay. Some of them would subsequently trickle into West Germany, occasionally by way of the German Democratic Republic; others fled in the summer of 1945 or departed with the organized transports, which began to deliver the area’s former inhabitants to their largely West German destinations in January 1946, after the Potsdam Agreement had made provisions for the population transfers in early August 1945. Already months before, in late May 1945, Czechoslovakia’s government had outlawed the region’s earlier designation, “Sudetenland/Sudety,” in favor of the more historically and culturally neutral “pohranicˇí” (borderlands).48 From the Sudeten German vantage point, gradual erasure of their one-time presence set in then. The task of the icon curtain and, in due time, the prayer wall would be to avert such impending obsolescence. The above toponymic rechristening proved that nomen est omen when the initial two-stage round of the border’s reinforcement got under way soon after the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in March 1948. Focused on the restructuring of the national frontier security forces, its fi rst phase (1948–50) sanctioned additional resettlements of the borderland’s already reshuffled populace, hurling the region’s warped demographic into another downward spiral.49 The second stage (1950–52) bolstered the army’s presence and thus secured the labor force needed to construct the technical barrier newly mandated by the Law on the Protection of the State Borders in July 1951. 50 By the end of that year, anticipating the inter-German border fortifications that would be built in May 1952, rows of barbed wire and high-voltage wire bristled along a ploughed security strip rimmed by a signal fence on the eastern interior. 51 Villages in close proximity of the divide were razed to make room for a “no man’s

16

Introduction

land.” The offshoots of this process—the rubble left behind by the area’s ongoing upheaval and the destruction of religious images from the torndown churches—will be the subject of the narrative in chapters 1 and 2. On the West German side, those who self-identified as Sudeten German expellees—some of them new residents of Bavaria and others compulsive visitors to its eastern border—regularly congregated to record these worrisome changes. The turnout was considerable. Sudeten Germans constituted more than half of Bavaria’s total expellee population (942,000 out of 1,696,000 people) in 1946, with those numbers rising to 1,025,205 in 1950. As early as 1949, 26.7 percent of them were active members of the new expellee organizations, centralized or local. 52 Aware of being the only expellee group with physical access to their former homeland’s border, they were not sure whether such a privilege was a blessing or a curse. In the face of this predicament, they did not merely dread “the Heimat transformed,”53 they actively observed its transformations and passed their impressions on to compatriots too frail, geographically distant, or poor to see them fi rsthand. Beginning in 1949, when the Allied ban on expellee associations and press (Koalitionsverbot) was lifted in all the western zones of occupation, their accounts inundated West Germany’s earliest expellee regional periodicals, the so-called homeland leaflets (Heimatblätter). 54 The pivotal years for these improvised period chronicles—1949, when their fi rst issues saw the light of day, and 1989, when their relevance to the waning confl ict began to dwindle—demarcate this study’s chronology. Counting some seventy titles in all of West Germany, the homeland leaflets “informed and shaped [the] opinions” of their readers, many also contributors. 55 The flexible reader/contributor role meant that the smaller papers especially, those with no or few professional journalists on staff, could produce information and document its reception at one and the same time. Authors often carried on serialized dialogues with their readers since the latter wrote back to encourage, criticize, or correct. Among Sudeten Germans, the leaflets became especially significant as discussion hubs for the small expellee communities who frequented the Czechoslovak–West German border or who lived in its vicinity. Nearly every self-respecting former county from across the divide boasted its own weekly or monthly. In keeping with their cozy designation as “homeland leaflets,” they promised the intimacy of a family album with the circulation of a small-town yearly report. Each opened to a smorgasbord of incongruous features and topics. Oftentimes, write-

Introduction

17

ups on Cold War diplomacy appeared side by side with recipes for grandmother’s plum jam pancakes. An issue had something for everyone. As Andrew Demshuk points out, their content never seamlessly aligned with the abrasive political tenor of the central expellee publications, such as the Sudetendeutsche Zeitung (SdZ, 36,000 copies yearly) or the Mitteilungsblatt der Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft (about 2,600 copies yearly). 56 Of course, some overlaps were unavoidable. Homeland leaflets with limited circulation did not have the resources to generate their own features on national or international issues and therefore reprinted such articles from the central papers. Yet hard news was not everything. Beyond the main headlines, where anti-Czech and anticommunist propaganda was slathered on thick, there was still plenty of room for contributors’ original interventions, not dictated from above. After all, the homeland leaflets had preceded the SdZ by two to three years and had therefore had a chance to develop their own flair. Yet these works were anything but apolitical; on the contrary, politics pervaded them through and through. To cater to the middlebrow palate, which was never content with the news alone, the political had to be assimilated in ways that did not confl ict with the “tight-knit communal feel” to be found on the inside pages of the leaflets. 57 To their subscribers, who usually numbered between several hundred and several thousand, these periodicals served up the kind of writing and visuals in which illustrated papers have traded since their nineteenth-century heyday: uncomplicated rhymes (often written in dialect), genre scenes, and travel notes. In such features, the authors’ intimate observations, private confessions, and personal hopes abounded. But it was not too long before the Cold War seeped into the content of these ostensibly simple forms. In this way, the weeklies, monthlies, and yearbooks strung together a dense record not only of the Iron Curtain itself, but also of the multifaceted civilian responses to and interventions in its landscape—the works described at the beginning of this introduction. To this day, they remain some of the most underrated sources for the study of the Cold War. In The Icon Curtain I leaf through their pages to broaden the still narrow scope of what we know and presume about West Germany’s expellee cultures. The complexity of the newcomers’ interventions in the making of the Federal Republic’s Cold War and in the Cold War–era’s Federal Republic—whether we approve of such efforts or not—implodes the constraints that have defi ned several decades’ worth of scholarship on these groups. There is, in other words, much more to the expellees

18

Introduction

than their political revisionism, the pitfalls and successes of their integration, or their obsessions with belonging—although these few keywords, sadly, do sketch the research status quo in broad strokes. To follow Lora Wildenthal’s lead and expand the limited vocabulary, in this book I have taken Sudeten German fictions as an excuse to look both beyond the proverbial “expellee lobby” as well as beyond its single-minded fi xation on Heimat—the contours of German belonging mapped at least since the nineteenth century. 58 This is not to say that the above keywords do not matter in my analysis; it is only to say that they are not its end. Excessive attention to the notorious expellee umbrella organization, the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), or to the smaller but similarly vocal regional associations (Landsmannschaften), has all too often obscured the fabric of the day-to-day lives and pastimes of their rankand-fi le members. The same pertains to those who had opted out of the organized collectives but who still self-identified as Sudeten Germans and subscribed to one or even several homeland leaflets. To put the frequently surprising undertakings of these ordinary expellees in the limelight, this study focuses on Sudeten German contributions to the making of an international Cold War symbol—the prayer wall—a symbol so very tightly and confusingly bound up with their antipathy for the border upon which Churchill’s curtain had descended. Even more than other German expellees, Sudeten Germans had political reasons to render this border uncertain or transient, even if, as we shall see in chapter 2, they did initially reinforce it. Contrary to the observation that in the wake of 1945 all expellee groups “identified the . . . quickly and irrevocably shut down border of the Iron Curtain . . . with the loss of their Heimat,”59 the divide appeared more irrevocable to some collectives than it did to others. This had to do with West Germany’s delayed recognition of the Oder-Neisse Line, a division that placed the former German territories in the East under Polish or Soviet control. Thus, up until 1970, the expellee newcomers from those areas had legal grounds to hope for their imminent return to a Germany within the borders of 1937—whether they actually cherished such a fantasy or not.60 The state fostered these hopes with considerable support that ranged from funding expellee libraries and museums to including their recipes in postwar cookbooks.61 Yet the Sudeten Germans, fully enfranchised only after the Federal Refugee and Expellee Law (Bundesvertriebenengesetz) was passed on 19 May 1953, found themselves in a different boat from the East Prussians or the Silesians, with neither

Introduction

19

a legal basis nor federal support for repatriation: Hitler’s Germany had annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, and the borders recarved that year had been pronounced void at the Potsdam Conference (17 July–2 August 1945). To hope, these expellees had to count on themselves. The following description of the forests and, subsequently, their “bards,” traces the genesis of such self-reliance and prepares the ground for the following chapters.

Forests Almost exactly a century before “Siberia” became a Cold War–era catchword for the desolate landscapes that existed behind the Iron Curtain, the prolific historians Bernhard Grueber and Adalbert Müller, in their introductory guidebook from 1846, christened the Bohemian Forest “a German Siberia.”62 At the time, of course, the area’s unkind environs were described as entirely natural rather than human-wrought. Their appearance was a rarity in a corner of the continent otherwise well populated and thoroughly exploited. Even German forestry, an institution that had steadily grown since the early eighteenth century, had not yet touched its slopes.63 The adjective “primeval,” repeated in virtually every guidebook since 1846, testified precisely to this circumstance. And yet the original epithet stuck not for lack of grooming alone: the forest residents also contributed their part. In the opinion of Grueber and Müller, a quick glance at the “untaimed wilderness composed of rocks, forest, and marshland . . . , inhabited by raging beasts and half-savages,” explained why German “poets set the most horrifying scenes of their tales of banditry” there.64 Still, as much as the duo relished giving their readers the shudders, their guide was instrumental in propagating the gradual domestication of Central Europe’s last “terra incognita.”65 Its pages were a prelude to the late nineteenth-century project of making the Bohemian Forest’s thicket appear exotic but not unwelcoming, its animals proud but not ferocious, and its inhabitants authentic but not uncivilized. In the advancing tourist age, which would soon fi ll the forest with consumptive urbanites, myth and reality had to meet halfway. Admittedly, this relatively tame version of the Bohemian Forest no longer accorded with that described by Schiller or Pocock. Yet neither did it come completely stripped of its titillating elements. Among the latter, raw, and thus ambivalent, nature—a sanctuary and a crime scene in

20

Introduction

one—loomed large. If all forests possess “two sides: not only the pure, useful, and gentle, but also the dangerous—the society’s exterior, its negation,” the Bohemian Forest was no exception.66 The Manichean duality of “idyll and danger,” as we will see in chapter 3, defi ned the area well into the Cold War.67 To the border’s west, midtwentieth-century visitors could not make up their minds: Did the new strategic fortifications intensify the dread already inspired by the forest? Or did the forest’s relatively recently discovered therapeutic peacefulness help soothe the fears of the military installations? More than a century of German wilderness fantasies permeated the imagery of the most-protracted twentieth-century confl ict. Such phantoms, as Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora have observed, constitute the changing meanings of places. More than just a “form of physical presence,” the resulting locales serve as “expressions and the necessary medium of social processes,” and “represent a gathering of humans together with the material, social, political and symbolic appropriation of space that such a gathering always entails.”68 The Bohemian Forest functioned as just such an interface for locating the Cold War on the cultural, religious, and political map of German Sylvania. But in the nineteenth century, an avalanche of guidebooks in Czech or German set out to forge several generations of readers into prospective trailblazers of the “still untouched virginal forest with its magical darkness, its mysterious silence.” The German-language guidebooks’ targeted readership was mainly the Habsburg Empire, of which Bohemia was a part, and adjacent Bavaria. Written in an age when the German woods were verging on extinction due to heavy mining and industrialization, these publications touted the Bohemian Forest as the last green mid-continental frontier. “If one had read about the primeval forests in faraway transatlantic America and marveled at them in one’s mind,” wrote Josef Wenzig and Johann (Jan) Krejcˇí in the region’s fi rst popular-scientific account (1860), “here one can look at them with one’s own eyes.”69 By then, the New World had long been the yardstick for measuring the little that Central Europe had to offer in the way of wilderness.70 But the daring parallel aside, the forest, Wenzig and Krejcˇí assured their cautious readers, was “no longer what it used to be centuries ago, even half a century ago.” Its changes had indubitably positive repercussions for those in whom the authors hoped to awaken wanderlust. Allegedly, the robbers had moved on. Bears no longer treaded the exten-

Introduction

21

sive network of human paths: the last bear, the authors reported, was shot in 1856. The mellowed-down locals, as “honest, respectable, and good” as could be, could do no harm. If anything, they would help prepare a welcome escape from the smokestacks of galloping industrialization elsewhere. Anticipating the Nazi ideal of “organic technology,” the authors insisted that even the local industries—woodworking and glassblowing—were “not artificial (erkünstelt) but natural.” 71 For the German–Czech duo Wenzig and Krejcˇí, the Bohemian Forest was a controlled wilderness and its hard-working natives were both “Germans and Slavs.” By the late nineteenth century, however, the scholars’ much more nationally biased colleagues would insist that the area could only be home to and share a destiny with either one group or the other— not both. Each side placed its bid on the ostensibly “timeless and homogenously national” woodland, in resonance with the teachings of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, a German journalist and historian who argued that national character was inextricable from the inhabited landscape—which, in the case of the German-speaking lands, was the forest.72 Divisions, however, proliferated, and not only among different nationalities. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, German speakers themselves began subdividing the mountain range between the Bavarian Furth in the north and Austria’s Mühlviertel in the southeast into distinct regional units. Prior to that, the “Bohemian Forest” had been the umbrella term used to describe most of the wooded areas on both sides of the border, reaching well into what is now the Upper Palatine Forest. But that would soon change. To be sure, ethnic Germans on Bohemia’s western rim continued to hold on to the forest’s unity across borders. Nothing could qualify as their local metaphor for belonging within the German Kulturnation more than this intact whole, in which the Bavarian Forest was but a prelude (Vorwerk) integral to the woods of Bohemia.73 Yet Bavarians, concerned with the purported advances of “Slavdom” on their own territory, began to delineate the range’s distinct parts early on. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, their publications made increasingly frequent reference to the Bavarian Forest, by which they meant the area immediately west of the border, and to the Upper Palatine Forest, by which they meant the area to the northwest. By the early 1920s, some authors proclaimed that these western areas constituted the Bavarian Eastern Marches, an allegedly imperiled piece of land in need of support from all nationally minded Germans.74 They

22

Introduction

believed that the Bohemian Forest belonged, quite simply, on the border’s eastern side, in Bohemia. The creation of two distinct societies for the protection of their respective environments—the German Bohemian Forest League (Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund, 1884) and the Society for the Bavarian Forest (Verein Bayerwald, 1902)—mirrored the onset of the landscape’s fragmentation. Despite the ever more intricate nomenclature, the limits of these two spatial units remained fluid for some time to come. Decades would go by before the new names would catch on across the board. Toponymic discrepancies between the above-mentioned guidebooks betrayed the extended duration of this transition. Grueber and Müller, for example, felt compelled to use parentheses to identify their still obscure new subject, the Bavarian Forest, as identical to the Bohemian Forest. Wenzig and Krejcˇí, for their part, continued to understand both as two constituents of the same whole. A guidebook from 1913 clad the two ranges in a single “forest cloak that covered almost 700 square miles.” 75 Despite various official attempts to codify the region’s toponymy, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that the confusion about the forests’ famously serpentine boundaries was resolved.76 Only the descent of the Iron Curtain, wrote August Sieghardt, the region’s foremost West German historian of the postwar era, would fi nally separate them “more harshly and implacably than ever before.” 77 As I noted at the beginning of this introduction, the seemingly conclusive dissolution of the Bohemian Forest as a continuous cross-border entity made itself felt not solely in political, geographical, or ecological terms. Indeed, the area’s political partition between the Habsburg lands and Bavaria, outlined earlier, was several centuries old. While the border’s Cold War–era redesignation as the Iron Curtain had undisputed significance, the fact of division was qualitatively, and not quantitatively, new. The symbolic geographical disintegration of the Bohemian Forest was also, as I have just summarized, a long time in coming. And shifts in the region’s ecology were far from radical—at least not until the 1970s, when forest dieback, whether actual or imagined, would be on everybody’s lips. At the onset of the Cold War, the pines and spruces, with the exception of those cut down to create the high security zone, still stood, albeit on opposite sides of the divide that Churchill had announced in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. The forest even began to reconquer the land to the border’s immediate east, empty or only sparsely populated since the late 1940s. In the eyes of the region’s expelled ethnic Ger-

Introduction

23

man residents, the demise of this landscape was therefore, fi rst and foremost, cultural. The expelled Germans volunteered to promote the Bohemian Forest not only as a geographical but also as a “culturally unified entity” that had once been populated, they advertised, predominantly by German speakers on both sides.78 From this viewpoint, the area bore some resemblance to the Eichsfeld, a large Catholic enclave split by the interGerman border. Sudeten Germans, however, infused their defi nition of “culture” with an ambition not yet extracted from the Eichsfeld’s annals, although new research promises a possibility of comparable fi ndings there as well.79 Writing in opposition to the reinforced border, the Sudeten German literati, established and aspiring alike, appealed not only to the culture of everyday life—custom, language, religion, trade, farming, and traffic (all of which are prominent also in the Eichsfeld’s history). They also mapped the region’s oneness in much less prosaic terms, alleging the area’s “cohesive poetic trajectory and shape” (geschlossene dichterische Entfaltung und Gestaltung) that had fed into the seemingly bottomless reservoir of popular piety, folklore, and literary fiction propagated over decades, if not centuries.80 To lend this trajectory an authoritative footing and a sense of continuity in the new era, over time they identified three generations of socalled “Bohemian Forest bards” (Böhmerwalddichter). These bearers of tradition, living and deceased, had ostensibly dedicated their literary talent to the area’s character. The name of Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868), a literary icon who had been born in southwest Bohemian Oberplan and who was considered to be a “symbolic figure” in völkisch circles, was put forth to give credence to the fi rst generation of forest bards.81 The roster of the two subsequent cohorts was similarly brief. The Sudeten German nationalist and Nazi zealot Hans Watzlik (1879–1948) represented the second generation, while the younger regional authors Karl Winter (1908–1977), Leo Hans Mally (1901–1987), and Sepp Skalitzky (1901– 1992), whose collective works bridged the period of the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–38) and Cold War–era West Germany, were counted as full-fledged members of the third. Only allegiance to the style represented by these “bards” could explain the astonishing continuity within the literary sources considered throughout this book. While their lack of stylistic, thematic, or generic development will no doubt take the historically minded reader by surprise, it served a very specific purpose: to abate the geopolitical novelties by means of the cultural canon. Al-

24

Introduction

though the border changed incessantly, the forest tropes, passed down from aces to fledglings, often remained strangely arrested in time. There was, Sudeten Germans found, some comfort in that.

Forest Bards As bards are wont to do, the self-professed “Bohemian Forest bards” after Stifter began with collecting, although their own folk-inspired writings were hardly in short supply. This task both lent them a Brothers Grimm-like authority and yielded a critical volume of works to present to a broader public. Dissatisfied with having been demoted to an ethnic minority’s mouthpiece in the First Republic between 1918 and 1938, the Sudeten German folklorists and literati tapped into the aforementioned bottomless reservoir. Helmed by Watzlik, then a rising star of regional literature, the second generation of “bards” put the landscape in the limelight that it had not previously enjoyed—not even in Stifter’s works, then still read, as mentioned in chapter 3, mostly in the former Habsburg lands.82 The self-appointed heirs to Stifter’s literary fortune, this cohort went a step further: they handed over bits and pieces of folklore, collated and edited, to publishers in Germany, rather than only Czechoslovakia or Austria. Indeed, the German venues had the potential to expose a much broader public to the folkloric and literary charms of Central Europe’s “terra incognita.” While Watzlik’s fi rst edition of the area’s sagas and his own forest-themed works appeared locally in Budweis/Cˇ eské Budeˇjovice and Oberplan/Horní Planá (not coincidentally, Stifter’s birthplace), the subsequent volumes came out with Oldenbourg, a well-known press in Munich.83 Comparable highlights of the oral tradition had joined The Treasury of German Sagas (Deutscher Sagenschatz) even earlier, by way of an eponymous book series published in Jena in 1924. That volume’s editor, Gustav Jungbauer, writing from his desk in Oberplan, commented that sagas published elsewhere in Europe at that time merely served to entertain, but that “this does not apply to the Bohemian Forest.” Jungbauer took pride in the regional limits to enlightened secularism and found merit in the persistent power of superstition, a trait he alleged that was still upheld by the “predominant majority” of Bohemian Forest residents.84 Against that backdrop, the above gems of folk wisdom arose from a “strange mix of pagan and Christian beliefs” that strayed

Introduction

25

far from the rational. Jungbauer happily revised the established defi nition of the saga as an exegetic attempt to explain the mysterious—as the outcome of logic and reason. He argued that, conversely, it was “primarily fantasy and recollection” that were at work in the emergence of this form. Jungbauer was not alone in erasing the boundary between fantasy and reality under the sylvan canopy. Watzlik, for his part, argued that the area’s residents had walked among “all manner of terrifying and moody [mythical] creatures,” as native to the woods “as bears and crows”— and that they continued to do so in his own time.85 The burden of maintaining this impression would fall to the “bards” who chose to follow in Watzlik’s footsteps in Cold War Germany. The truth was that Watzlik would have much rather shared the forest with mythical monsters, big and small, than with Czechs. It came as no surprise that in the introduction to his unambiguously titled book The Green German Bohemian Forest (Grüner deutscher Böhmerwald), which had gone through as many as four editions, or 31,000 copies, by 1940, the author had exhaled with palpable relief. At long last, the forest was left to Germans and monsters alone. In the wake of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, Watzlik breathlessly gasped at the forest’s unitary reinstatement: The senseless, unnatural border, which had separated and cut the divinely ordained green unity of the Bohemian Forest, has been swept away by the Sudetenland’s liberation from the dominance of a foreign people, and now the entire primeval range rests together with its thousand mountain forests, redeemed and pacified, under the protective wing of the German eagle, freely open to the German will to travel, German love of forest and hiking, the rejoicing eyes of German artists—a wilderness-green, tremendous adventure, a unique nature’s garden. The most intimate and wondrous low mountain range in Europe now enriches the motherly Reich with the dowry of its indescribable, inexhaustible beauty. 86

The writer’s flourishes sought to lure all German hikers into the landscape that was, by his own admission, only tenuously European, at times even reminiscent of the “northern tundra.” A flashback to Grueber and Müller’s “German Siberia,” the woods, according to the writer, brimmed with contradictions. Their topography encompassed birdsong-fi lled valleys, windswept mountaintops, “the tragedy (Trauerspiel) of the moor,”

26

Introduction

and everything in between. As he pieced together a setting fit for drama, Watzlik wondered: “Is this still our world?” Originally, his was a speculation about the constraints of human geography in the face of the wilderness, “the breeding ground of dark sagas” and their uncanny protagonists.87 Yet, five years later, after May 1945, when the Beneš Decrees became official, Watzlik’s question would trouble the new political reality. Indeed, from then on, the forest on the eastern side of the border was no longer considered to be the world of ethnic German residents. Neither was the emerging midcentury no man’s land a proper habitat for their monsters, beasts with such bizarre names as Nachtkrallei, Haarstubenwaberl, Augstalt, or Saurüsselmann. Along with other Sudeten Germans, Watzlick and his neophyte followers born around the turn of the twentieth century now fled to West Germany, taking their monsters along with them. Even before the expellees were placed under the auspices of individual Bavarian towns, such as Regensburg (and, eventually, of the entire province, between 1952 and 1954), these towns opened their doors to authors such as Watzlik. Following his year-long imprisonment in Czechoslovakia, Watzlik was invited to spend the rest of his days in Tremmelshausen, a large farmstead outside Regensburg, in a “mild and legend-fi lled landscape.” From there, he prepared the ground for what would become, only a year after his death in 1948, an expellee public and literary sphere within West Germany. As he waited to be de-Nazified in an internment camp outside Regensburg, Watzlik’s acolyte and one of the forest’s last bards, Sepp Skalitzky, received the following words of encouragement from his ever optimistic mentor: “Hold out and be in good spirits, everything passes, and then a new, wiser life begins.”88 Watzlik did not, however, limit himself to good wishes alone. In his cards and letters to Skalitzky he shared an extensive list of contacts from the publishing world. There was a Bayreuth bookseller who had headed up the town’s Nazi-era press; a Munich-based editor of a small new series entitled Sudeten German Storytellers; and a Sudeten German anthology about to be edited by the recently founded Adalbert Stifter Society, in the same city. “I consider yours a promising cause, and you could even make some money on it,” Watzlik commented about Skalitzky’s writing.89 “If we, one-timers, can publish again,” Watzlik speculated, it would be “a rich German literary year.” 90 And while West Germany’s literary world hardly required a contribution on the part of the “bards,” the latter felt emboldened to give the Bohemian Forest another ticket to

Introduction

27

life. Skalitzky, for his part, was already trying his luck by publishing in his internment camp’s newsletter. Watzlik would not live to see either the successes of such ventures or their failures. The point, however, is that the last years of his career were an investment in continuity for the surviving younger “bards,” now West German residents with checkered political pasts. His own postwar accomplishments as a writer were modest at best: Watzlik released his last Bohemian Forest monster to roam the West German literary world in 1948. That year, his considerably expanded story “Stilzel, the Bohemian Forest Kobold,” originally from The Green German Bohemian Forest, was published with his new publisher in Reutlingen.91 Neither the book nor its promotional readings had brought the author the desired publicity or secured a livelihood for Lina, his widow-to-be.92 Watzlick’s greatest achievement, therefore, was to function as a transmission wire among his atomized colleagues. For all his complaints about fragmentation in the ranks and the third generation’s single-minded and opportunistic self-reinvention, Watzlik remained an incomparable one-man tracing service. His letters and postcards connected writers, shared their latest news, and passed on contact information. By the time the Allied ban on coalitions was lifted in 1949, a year after Watzlik’s death, Sudeten German authors such as Sepp Skalitzky, Leo Hans Mally, Karl Winter, and Otto Zerlik had already been linked to each other, and, by way of public readings, to their audiences.93 The time was now right for them to put the Bohemian Forest on West Germany’s literary and cultural map. Their writings laid the foundation for the many vernacular portrayals of the Cold War–era sylvan borderlands introduced in this book.

Chapter Outline The narrative of the book, by moving up and down the western side of the Czechoslovak–West German border, attempts to place the reader at the juncture between the Bavarian/Bohemian Forest and the adjacent woods in the northern Upper Palatinate. Each of the following four chapters sheds light on the line that contoured this stretch of the Iron Curtain—the prayer wall. Because the prayer wall had many functions, it was not possible to confi ne my source materials to any one field of study. Therefore, in the tradition of cultural studies, The Icon Curtain draws on several disci-

28

Introduction

plines to uncover the various aspects of the prayer wall’s emergence. I have borrowed from, among others, art history (for iconology), geography (for perspectives on human ecology), and from literary studies (for narratology), as well as from such already interdisciplinary fields as visual studies, travel studies, and ritual studies, to provide as creative an interpretation as possible. Each chapter fleshes out a specific artistic form that contributed to the development of the prayer wall throughout the Cold War and embeds this form in the context of a concrete ritual or creative practice. In chapter 1, “Conditions: Ruins of the Cold War,” the creative practice examined is that of “compilation.” This was an undertaking that gripped both Germanys for well over a decade in the wake of World War II, as dozens of photographic compilations appeared to chronicle the destruction of the war, followed by Germany’s subsequent path to reconstruction. Soon, a competing project got underway among Sudeten Germans, who were keen to document the Cold War damage along the Iron Curtain. To this end, in 1959 a prominent Sudeten German activist and publisher, Ernst Bartl, took his international audience, conversant in German, English, or French, on a photographic tour of the border’s eastern side. His main goal was to dissociate the visual trope of ruins from the postwar era and repurpose it for depicting the ongoing confl ict. This was no easy task: Sudeten German rubble lacked both urban drama and obvious Cold War provenance. In chapter 1, I analyze how Bartl grappled with the collapse of photography’s ability to point—its indexicality—as he collected, organized, and stylized more than a decade’s worth of visual information about the area’s past and present. In the end, his editorial activity validated the icon curtain and made room for the prayer wall by identifying for a broad audience two interlinked conditions. One, the region’s dilapidated condition, was purely physical; the other, this very state as a prerequisite for the prayer wall, which arose as a substitute for the losses to the border’s east, was circumstantial. Only under these two conditions could construction—the subject of the following chapter—actually begin. In chapter 2, “Cornerstones: Iconoclasm and the Making of the Prayer Wall,” pilgrimage is the practice I examine. This ritual served as a vehicle for transporting the Christian iconography of the broken body to the Cold War borderlands, where the icon curtain took root in religious worship. In 1950 and 1951, the Bavarian Border Police and local clerical authorities recorded two incidents involving German religious images from

Introduction

29

Czechoslovakia’s borderland villages earmarked for destruction. The fi rst was the spuriously documented discovery of an intact statue of the Virgin and Child, found laid across the border to West Germany near Mitterfi rmiansreut, a hamlet in the Upper Palatinate. The other was a crucifi x allegedly vandalized by a Czech soldier and rescued by a Bavarian border policeman. By reconstituting the polyphony of parochial, diocesan, and lay voices, native and expellee alike, this chapter recreates the converse paths of the two budding cults against the troubled backdrop of postwar popular piety and a belief in miracles in Europe’s Catholic areas. I investigate the extent to which the sculptures’ provenance, original appearance, damages suffered, and, fi nally, the legends of their border crossing, conditioned their rise or, conversely, decline as cornerstones of the church-sanctioned prayer wall. Additionally, I outline the role that the sculptures’ new physical setting and their photographic dissemination played in framing ordinary images as extraordinary aesthetic objects—as the latest additions to the canon of Christian iconography. In the wake of the iconoclasm of the Eastern Bloc in the early 1950s, the changing valence of these images laid the foundations of an icon curtain just as the strategic Iron Curtain was taking physical shape. In chapter 3, “Infrastructure: Civilian Border Travel and Travelogues,” the practice is “travel.” Along the Iron Curtain, travel gave rise to the borderland report—a travelogue tailored to address period-related exigencies. Building on the budding research on tourism to the interGerman border, I describe the Czechoslovak–West German divide as a significant destination, not merely as a threshold to be crossed, for the German “travel wave” of the 1950s. Rather than utilizing the sources of the state and its institutions, as others have done, I turn to the narratives of individuals who traveled to the border between the 1950s and the 1980s. The chapter shows that Sudeten Germans were some of the most prolific reporters from the border, and that they were judicious in committing their impressions to the above-mentioned borderland reports. Cognizant of the area’s culturally loaded topography, they underscored the degree to which the forest’s ambivalent characteristics—its Manichean duality of “idyll and danger”—determined the border experiences. These were perplexingly suspended between war and peace. The borderland reports stepped in to demonstrate and simultaneously resolve the confusion about the unprecedented type of confl ict that the Cold War represented and about the changeable appearance of its forested frontline. Disseminated in the expellee press, such writings projected a new dis-

30

Introduction

cernment of space and time. On the one hand, their authors instructed readers in how to recognize the border’s course. On the other hand, they encouraged them to respect the boundary between the past, when the border could be easily traversed, and the present, when it was sealed and much more dangerous. Instead of promoting “border consciousness,” a nationalist sentiment engendered by comparable texts from the interwar era, their narratives aimed to generate what I call “border awareness,” a blueprint for fi nding one’s way in a Cold War landscape with a layered history. In chapter 4, “Uses: Visual Nostalgia at the Prayer Wall,” the practice is “nostalgia.” On site, nostalgia becomes a conduit for borderland visuality in two mediums: the architecture of civilian sites constitutive of the prayer wall, and the poetry inspired by such structures. Visual momentum, I argue, has been integral to longing ever since Johannes Hofer fi rst coined the term in his medical dissertation (1688). Following nostalgia’s postwar resurgence in medical practice, Sudeten Germans not only claimed to share this predicament with Europe’s other uprooted peoples, they also traced its lineage back to the original “Bohemian Forest bard”—Stifter—and harnessed this pedigree for Cold War uses. Moving around in the borderlands, where Stifter’s characters as well as the author himself had once walked, Sudeten Germans understood nostalgia as a specifically visual phenomenon predicated on a disconnect between the act of looking and its outcome—between vision and image. In several close readings of border-themed poems, I outline the particulars of this dichotomy in the Cold War setting and explore the nomenclature that Sudeten Germans developed to account for the said split. Then I trace the influence of this bifurcation on the architecture meant to facilitate vision in situ, focusing on the most elaborate borderland tower, completed in 1961. In contrast to earlier Iron Curtain studies, which predicated Cold War–era visual encounters between East and West on the stark opposition between self and other, I posit that nostalgic looking muddles such discrete categories and offers a more integral model for thinking about Cold War encounters. My discussion culminates in the epilogue, which draws on the elements shared by the sources in all the chapters. Summing up, I reiterate the difficulty of conveying the tragic pitch, commonly associated with documentation of the Cold War barrier, in the material on which this book feeds. Whenever records of witnessed events fall short of tragedy, creative representations come in to compensate. Consequently, in

Introduction

31

all four chapters, framing emerges as a central compensatory technique. These framings, several types of which I enumerate, are particular to Sudeten German sources. And while this book is fi rst and foremost about the Iron Curtain and only secondarily about Sudeten Germans, it concludes by assessing the importance of the Sudeten Germans to one of the Cold War’s key assignments: purveying the West’s eastern limit. Our knowledge about the latter would be incomplete without the contributions of these expellees.

A Note on Toponyms Place names fi rst appear in both Czech and German, and are subsequently mentioned only in German, consistent with the sources.

Chapter One

Conditions Ruins of the Cold War Destruction on Display

D

espite the dense hem of taciturn spruces, beginning in the late 1940s the Czechoslovak–West German border’s western side was hardly the picture of a godforsaken wilderness. Roaming along the divided forest’s edges were not only the Bavarian Border Police (Bayerische Grenzpolizei, BBP), the US Army, and, to a lesser extent, the Federal Border Police (Bundesgrenzschutz). Every year, hundreds, if not thousands, of Sudeten German civilians went out to reconnoiter the border as well. Thanks to their own observations and to the intelligence received from family or friends who had stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, visiting expellees were able to fathom the scale of the ongoing transformations that were taking place to the border’s immediate east. The new face of the other side struck them as nothing if not distorted. The cleared security zone, the expansive military training areas such as the Polletitz/Boletice, the artificial lakes along the Vltava, and the radar stations and watchtowers erected as part of the strategic barrier that was the Iron Curtain, stuck out to them like a sore thumb.1 These developments affected not only the forest, cut down in places to ensure greater visibility and access, they scarred the lived environment as well—our protagonists’ former homes, now dilapidated or razed altogether. Frequently featured in homeland leaflets throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the changes in Bohemia’s west provided a plentiful source for depictions of the inexorable breakdown in the cross-border infrastructure as it had once existed. Scores of authors and editors used photography, a medium with a strong claim to veracity, as a means to disseminate the stories to

Conditions

33

as broad an audience as possible and to enhance their appeal. Yet alarmingly, in this task, the pictures came very close to failing. The problem was that, at the time, visual tropes of destruction, as the following discussion will make clear, did not belong in the Cold War vocabulary. In both Germanys and abroad, rubble (the physical debris left behind by World War II) and ruins (the aftermath of destruction in general) were fi rmly entrenched in the public’s mind as images that defi ned the immediate postwar period. The war had cast a “long shadow” and left behind “lasting and persistent aftereffects.” Signs of the wreckage were the foremost among these. 2 For Sudeten Germans keen on putting the damage wreaked by the Iron Curtain on display, this circumstance was more than an inconvenience—it was a major roadblock. Removing it came with high stakes: the area’s deplorable condition in the East, it was believed, was also the essential precondition for the prayer wall in the West. The icon curtain, it bears reminding, rose to compensate for the defi nitively lost sites that had existed across the border, so that each resulting replica did its part in demarcating the western rim as the culture’s dependable sanctuary. Simply put, without that debris, there could be no prayer wall. And without the prayer wall, the people thought, West Germany’s southeastern border lacked its humane flair—a worthy antithesis to the East’s cut-and-dried military barrier. Even more essential to the Sudeten German project than the physical detritus itself was its documentation in the public record. Sudeten German activists understood that the more extensively they could outline the scope of Eastern Bloc destruction, the more effectively they would be able to justify and validate the new continuum of structures and artifacts on the western side. With this in mind, they were determined to downplay the context by which both ruins and rubble were associated with the immediate postwar era, and to connect them instead with the burgeoning new standoff. Detecting, foregrounding, and displaying the ruins of the Cold War—the labor at the heart of this chapter’s narrative—proved indispensable for the making of the icon curtain. No contemporary tackled this prospect more systematically than Ernst Bartl, a prominent activist and publisher from Eger/Cheb. Whereas most of his countrymen were limited to brief reports of current border conditions accompanied by one or two illustrations, Bartl had at his fi ngertips a vast archive of images from both before and after 1945. He arranged a selection of them in a trilingual volume entitled Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present

34

Chapter One

(1959). As the book’s compiler, editor, and publisher, Bartl hoped that the pictures would themselves take care of the storytelling. Yet, in reality, they resisted his project of stylizing the ruins’ passage from the postwar era into the Cold War era. Before considering these obstacles in detail, let us unpack the significance of Bartl’s entwining of two loaded terms of historical analysis: “postwar” and “Cold War.” There is nothing like ruins “to invite us to contemplate [the] layered temporality” of the two eras, and there is nothing like the photographic chronicle of destruction, the genre at stake here, to confound the contours of the two periods. 3 In order to understand the physical beginnings of the icon curtain, we must fi rst apprehend the scope of both the postwar and the Cold War eras, as this will help us understand the importance of their entanglement in Bartl’s book. We shall approach them in reverse, beginning with the late 1950s.

Postwar and Cold War The volatile term “postwar”—an adjective so pervasive that it has become a noun—has enjoyed several decades of considerable notoriety. “Wars end. . . . But when does the postwar era end?” mused the historian Klaus Naumann in his reflections on that era’s uncertain duration.4 In the German context, academics and public intellectuals have linked the blurred chronological contours of the period to the contentious issues of normalization, reunification, and to various aspects of twentieth-century remembrance. 5 When did the postwar era begin? When did it end? Did it end? What would be the interpretive ramifications of its passing—or, perhaps, its tenacity? Finally, is there a “post-postwar”?6 The persistence of these questions suggests a repeated deferral of closure. Irreducible to a fi nal phase of, or an epilogue to, a grand confl ict, the postwar period remains an open-ended chapter.7 The predominance of the term in public discussions and academic writing went unchallenged until the early 1990s. At that point, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, another significant periodic marker—the “Cold War”—unseated “postwar” from its privileged position. Increasing references to the world’s most recent large-scale confl ict alluded to a chronology that coincided uneasily with that of the postwar period. The already muddled relationship between the two eras was further compounded by the vagueness

Conditions

35

that now persisted in discussions of the Cold War as well. The periodization of the Cold War remains only indistinctly defi ned: When did it begin? Did it end? If so, when? Finally, was there a Cold War—or was it no more than “a deceit or fiction, an artificial notion”?8 A revaluation of the meanings and reciprocal influences of both eras has been long overdue. Few approaches have manifested this need as pointedly as the “study of keywords,” a subset of socio-lexicography that purports to demarcate discrete periods by defi ning their central concepts. Dieter Felbick, an expert in this field, asks whether the Cold War even merits a place in his collection dedicated to the postwar period. On the one hand, he is hesitant to recognize the relevance of such a “borderline case” to the scope of his study. On the other hand, he cannot but ponder the relational bond between two terms marked by “such a close-knit connection.” In the end, Felbick’s willingness to deliberate their tie to one another is more important than his tentative inclusion of “Cold War” on his roster of postwar signifiers.9 Felbick’s musings obliquely acknowledge that neither era was a mere episode in a neat chronological sequence. In other words, there may not have been a straightforward path “from war to post-war and from post-war to a Cold War.”10 Taking my cue from Felbick, in this chapter I outline the preamble to the emergence of the prayer wall—destruction in the Eastern Bloc borderlands—and use it to take a step toward a more-refi ned articulation of the two eras’ referential and semantic scopes. What distinguishes them? And conversely, what do they share? To buck the narrow confi nes of periodicity, Frank Biess has already proposed that “postwar” is “not only a chronological and thematic unit but also an epistemological tool.” This chapter adopts his important suggestion to continue reclaiming both “postwar” and “Cold War” as categories of cultural analysis. Close attention to holdovers has been part of such recovery. Instead of pursuing the postwar era as a mythical “zero hour,” Biess and his colleagues, for example, link it to the tenaciousness of the war that it is thought to have bracketed. Postwar societies, they argue, inherited a subtle violent momentum from the war itself. The latter, such a residue implies, was more than a fi nite prehistory: it coconstituted its own aftermath.11 “Postwar” and “Cold War” have been entwined just as intensely, and not only because of the memory and fear of the bombing—the “presence of a catastrophic past in the midst of a prosperous present”—has shaped both.12 Their other entanglements, uncovered here, transpire not only in hindsight: they were obvious already

36

Chapter One

to contemporaries in the fi rst full Cold War decade. At stake is thus not when the two eras unfolded, but rather what they mean—not just how we understand them, but how they understood themselves. Thus far, their imbrications have been defi ned ex negativo. In most existing accounts, the postwar era is neither an “incubation period” nor a mere synonym “for a new Cold War order.”13 In this chapter, in contrast, I imagine the intersection of both eras for what it was rather than what it was not by looking at the their convergences on a par with the rifts. Rubble, in this analysis, is a rare point of both convergence and fracture. To see why, let us examine how Bartl’s vicarious photographic journey along the Iron Curtain in the fi rst full Cold War decade mobilizes visual legacies of the postwar period for a Cold War agenda.

Where Central Europe’s Gilded Age Turns to Dust The ambition of Bartl’s book, to reach out to an international audience conversant in German, English, or French, may seem odd for a volume that came off the press in a provincial publishing house founded by Bartl in Geislingen, a small and heavily expellee-populated town between (West) Germany’s Stuttgart and Ulm. Why does the author select, group, and caption more than a decade’s worth of images only to position their implied viewer right alongside the Iron Curtain, where most Westerners have never set foot? Moreover, why does he supply town and country scenes observed on the barrier’s eastern side, rather than having his public look at or through the divide from the west, as the borderland tourists, prayer-wall architects, and pilgrims described in chapters 2, 3, and 4 would do? Why does he further provincialize his account by circumscribing the volume’s geography to just one area, the Egerland/ Chebsko, an administrative unit in western Czechoslovakia that bordered on the West German Upper Palatinate and Upper Franconia in the west and East German Saxony in the north? The choice of this ostensibly unknown region is purposeful, as it is obscure in name only. The world, Bartl implies, has heard of the Egerland but has to realize it yet. The author takes two hundred pages to refresh our memory, even if we scarcely need this much. Home to the internationally acclaimed “spa triangle,” the area ought to touch the hearts of all those who are partial to images of Central Europe’s gilded age. It was here, as one of Bartl’s contemporaries remarked, that “the heart of the Sudetenland

Conditions

37

[once] opened to the entire world.” Bartl mobilizes the triad of the region’s best-known resort towns—Carlsbad/Karlovy Vary, Marienbad/ Mariánské Lázneˇ, and Franzensbad/Františkovy Lázneˇ—to evoke memories of the Continent’s once glamorous leisure culture, its uniquely “spa-like (kurörtlicher) lifestyle,” to borrow a phrase from the same colleague and contemporary.14 Of course, Bartl is interested not in balneology, or mineral water treatments, but rather in the spas’ famous literary clientele and their works. He presumes that his audience will know and admire their oeuvres. To think of it, the range of these works is indeed impressive. By 1959, when Bartl’s volume was published, paeans to the decelerated pace and charms of these resort towns fi lled the pages of Goethe, Dostoyevsky, and Sholem Aleichem. Within two years, this gentle universe appeared on cinema screens, courtesy of Alain Resnais.15 Bartl’s own long list of celebrities goes on to include “emperors, kings, other crowned persons, noblemen, heroes of science and tone, secretaries of state, military commanders-in-chief, men of economy . . . , in short ‘the Great World.’”16 Bartl’s intention, however, was not merely to sing praises to the Egerland’s mark on the Western cultural canon. On the contrary, the ensuing hundred pages of the volume left no doubt that this universe was no more. The gilded age, in Bartl’s interpretation, was about to turn to dust. The descent of the Iron Curtain, if one is to believe his narrative, had ousted the glitterati from their comfortable hotel rooms, leaving a patina on the formerly luminous glamor of the promenades and water fountains. Moreover, it had completely erased parts of the Egerland from the face of Earth, rendering the region unrecognizable. “In the heart of Europe,” Bartl thunders ominously in his introduction, “at the forefront of the Cold War and no man’s land at the Iron Curtain, wilderness came about” (15). Not content with this mere statement, Bartl then sets out to portray the regress of the border’s eastern side into nature, which he relates conversely to the expansion of expellee activity on the barrier’s western side. Bartle then uses the latter part of the book to juxtapose “before” and “after” images, as another way to make his point and to draw international attention to the Sudeten German cause—a cause that by then had already found its fi rst expressions in the icon curtain. His photographic chronicle lays bare the confl ict that underpins Bartl’s entire project: the juxtaposition of the rhetoric of a return to the East and the reality of staying in the West. Both views were pervasive among German expel-

38

Chapter One

lees, but the reality was that no matter how much they may have pined for their Heimat, in the late 1950s few were serious about going back.17 At the same time as Bartl urges his ostensibly international readership to condemn the negative consequences of Czechoslovak governance in the former Sudetenland and endorse the return of his compatriots to their homes, he tacitly accepts the Egerland’s ruined condition. In the end, the West German prayer wall, with its new sites and sanctuaries, examined in the following chapters, will stand as the region’s future ersatz. En route to such an endorsement, the author highlights the nexus between the area’s appearance during the interwar period, its postwar destruction, and its present condition under the Cold War. The book’s pictorial narrative unfolds at the cusp between the waning 1950s, when the physical impact of World War II was still remembered vividly, and the early 1960s, when atomic-age fears and Cold War tensions approached a boiling point. Yet the author’s iconography of Cold War trepidations, as we will see, has little to do with nuclear angst.18 Instead, it draws on stock images of the postwar period, although it is never entirely clear whether Bartl’s act of borrowing adopts the Cold War lens to commemorate or, on the contrary, to extinguish the postwar rubble. The span of the narrative serves to highlight the fear of erasure, be it of landscapes or of their residents’ habitus, as a fundamental feature of both the postwar and Cold War eras. And it is this fear that Bartl harnesses as a call to action.19 Embracing photography as its principal medium, his book derives its central message—rescuing the Egerland from its rapid decay, even if only by way of Western replicas—from the unstable semantics attached to the photographs of wartime destruction in the wake of World War II. Egerland is thus not an epitaph for the postwar era winding down, but rather it is an affi rmation of its continued influence, with no closure in sight. Of course, the volume remains characteristic of expellee politics in West Germany: it is no coincidence that it appeared in the year of the largest annual Sudeten German congress ever. Politically revisionist accents fi nd a personal outlet in the book: Bartl dedicates the volume to the memory of his brother Walter, a senior administrator who was sentenced to death in postwar Czechoslovakia. While we learn nothing about Walter’s past, likely inextricable from Nazi rule in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the author does dwell on his sibling’s death as a “victim of the Czech blood lust and thirst for hatred.” Just as was the case for most expellee pronouncements, Bartl veers between expres-

Conditions

39

sions of anti-Czech sentiment, on the one hand, and declarations of writing “without hatred or greed vis-à-vis the expellers,” on the other (314). And it would be difficult to expect anything less from a man whose track record included a sixteen-year stint as editor of the monthly Der Egerländer, from whose archive many of the book’s photographs are sourced, and a long-term appointment as president of the Community of Egerlanders (Bundesvüa(r)stäiha der Eghalanda Gmoi). Yet, as many other sources discussed throughout this book, the volume transcends expellee politics. Instead, it invites us to consider the broader questions of form and meaning in the pictorial media used to capture twentieth-century periodicities. In particular, it shows that the awareness of a referential dissonance between the postwar and Cold War eras is not a conceit of twenty-fi rst-century scholarship. It is, rather, an overlooked subtext in some of the earliest attempts to register and render contradictory overlaps between these periods’ signifiers. Bartl’s validation of the prayer wall by way of picturing its preconditions therefore illustrates that the relationship between the two eras is not what we imagine when we look back upon the past century. That is exactly what troubled contemporary readers—and, as we will soon see, with good reason. Because photographs of World War II and its aftermath carried a particularly strong signifying valence for memory cultures in the wake of 1945, the said subtext is most obvious in photographic before-and-after chronicles of the Continent’s Cold War transformations, published as early as the 1950s. It follows that, at least in West Germany, such illustrated tomes became sites of friction between the memory of the postwar period and the ongoing project of attempting to capture the most striking visual vignettes of the Cold War. They thus allow us to move away from perpetuating the periods’ neatly sequential or parallel trajectories, and toward a more accurate understanding of their intertwined semiotic histories. By extension, they also eliminate the necessity of choosing between either the “postwar” or the “Cold War,” and permit us to entertain the porous boundaries between their legacies. The following analysis of the ruins’ recoding sheds light on the reasons why images of postwar destruction escaped clear-cut identification or interpretation even at this early point. Additionally, it explains what made this circumstance particularly burdensome for Bartl. “If all material objects are semiotically underdetermined, the ruin is particularly open to differing representations,” writes George Steinmetz. 20 By and large, this

40

Chapter One

observation certainly holds true in the present context—“semantic instability” is precisely what brings about the recoding of the ruins in the fi rst place. Still, given the historical moment at which Bartl’s book appears and the geographical location that it profi les, “ruins” turns out to be a much less open-ended signifier. Bartl’s editorial comments suggest that in Central Europe of his time, destruction possessed a surplus of meaning, rather than its otherwise characteristic “vacuity.”21 His volume’s underlying assumption is that ruins do not reference just any catastrophe: in contrast to the expellee voices we will hear in chapter 3, Bartl makes no far-flung connections to the Thirty Years’ War or any other temporally remote conflagration. If anything, the debris of the late 1950s is overdetermined by the visual legacies of World War II. Bartl seems to believe that the ruins of the last conventional confl ict occupy the imagination of his European contemporaries so completely that associating rubble with the ongoing East-West tension is well-nigh impossible. And still, he ventures to make precisely such a coupling.

Rural Rubble As is well known, in the late 1940s and early 1950s a great deal of aesthetic production in both East and West Germany pivoted on “rubble” as an artistic point of departure and a term of the new cultural-historical nomenclature used in reference to literature or fi lm. The sight of heaps of debris provoked strong associations—spatial, temporal, medial, and semantic—as I outline on the following pages. Above all, destruction became an inalienable attribute of all things “postwar.” The photographed ruins of Richard Peter Sr.’s Dresden, August Sander’s Cologne, Henry Ries’s Berlin, or Regina Relang’s Munich provided ample testimony for the scale and significance of the devastation, both unparalleled and seemingly particular to the aftermath of World War II. Ever since, the adjective “urban” has become a pervasive modifier to describe these remains. “Rubble,” countless monographs assure us, was the stuff of postwar cities. 22 By extension, as W. G. Sebald reminds us in the opening of his influential On the Natural History of Destruction, provincial safe harbors (Heimat in its most traditional defi nition) are remembered as having been unscathed by the bombing. 23 Others have suggested that “there was a significant contrast between city and country” so that “the actual war destruction occurred as destruction of cities.” 24 Indeed, a four-

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41

hundred-page collection of essays by prominent German authors assigns fewer than thirty pages to “the postwar era in the provinces.” 25 Heimat’s apparent geographic distance from the fi restorms placed it on the periphery of discussions of postwar wreckage, which focused on such hubs as Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin, or on smaller industrial centers such as Halberstadt or Pforzheim. “Ruins,” in Sebald’s experience, were a cipher for “metropolis”: nothing was as closely associated with the word “city” as “heaps of debris, fi rewalls, and missing windows.” 26 A sense that provincial, bucolic Heimat, once a synechdochy for the nation, no longer reflected, matched, or reproduced Germany in its postwar state, pervades his observations. By setting out to redress the asymmetry between city and countryside, Bartl took on the task of picturing provincial debris. It is precisely these elusive stones, he contends, that are the ruins of the Cold War. Additionally, Bartl’s challenge stemmed from the fact that after 1945 postwar urban ruins have also been animated to serve as an eloquent allegory of postwar Germany. The ruins became capable of speaking for themselves precisely because the consequences of the carpet bombing of the cities could not be mistaken for the aftermath of earlier confl icts. 27 It did not hurt that photography, the privileged medium for documenting them, is described as similarly loquacious, communicating “through its very muteness.” 28 In part, the photographic medium worked because language, as Franz A. Hoyer observed in his introduction to Hermann Claasen’s memento of postwar Cologne (Song in the Furnace/Gesang im Feuerofen, 1949), “remains silent before the emergence of the senseless.” 29 Other influential chronicles of the destruction, such as Peter’s Dresden: A Camera Accuses (Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an, 1949), relied on photography’s indexicality (i.e., its ability to point to the referent) to fashion the postwar ruin into a doubly articulate motif. The title of Peter’s volume, but also its layout—dramatic full-page photographs highlighted by a handful of laconically poetic titles—speak to the author’s belief in the medium’s capacity to testify all by itself. Buttressed by such purported evidentiary power, the alleged loquaciousness of postwar ruins needed few supporting words. Peter distilled the pathos of ruins in brief titles and decried extensive captions as superfluous. This, however, was a luxury that Bartl could not afford. In his book, the photography faced a crisis of indexicality. It could still point, but it pointed in the wrong direction—toward the aftermath of World War II. A cascade of works, both photographic and cinematic, has made the

42

Chapter One

debris of World War II nothing short of photogenic. 30 During the 1950s and even into the 1960s, countless photographic volumes, published by presses large and small, ensured that the imagery of World War II would outlast its rubble and linger in the German consciousness—even if, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, Germans continued to send each other postcards of what once had been. 31 These ruins were “more than just a location”: they were an often unwelcome reminder of Germany’s wartime responsibility and a starting point for the reconstruction, subsumed under the rhetoric of the economic miracle in West Germany and the socialist Aufbau in the East. 32 Picturing the reconstructive impulse came with a teleology of its own—a teleology that Bartl, as we are about to see, could not quite emulate in his book. In the immediate postwar years, illustrated chronicles of the destruction helped to transform the uncanny skeletal remains of German cities into re-bounded and inhabitable cityscapes. The visual and, more rarely, textual narrative in most such volumes commonly built to a crescendo that culminated on the note of a new beginning. Ruins were not only the main reference point for the newly proclaimed “zero hour,” they were also the fertile ashes from which East as well as West Germany were poised to rise, politically as well as aesthetically. Ostensibly in contrast to all such multitiered iconographies, the Cold War, by defi nition, was not expected to conjure up Continental destruction, let alone make it visually accessible for photographic documentation. On the Continent, scholars concur, the confl ict was a “perpetuated eschatological emergency” and “a never-ending slalom between apocalyptic climaxes” projected more than real.33 This circumstance consequently determined the relatively serene appearance of the European sites where the confl ict was being staged. The specter of the mushroom cloud, symbolic of the possibility of nuclear destruction, took shape elsewhere—in the atmosphere, over water, or underground, but far away from the Continent. While there is little doubt that the Cold War was much more than a war of words, its European battlegrounds, with the exception of Berlin circa 1961, rarely figure as ruinscapes. 34 Outside the Berlin Wall, the ruins of the Cold War do not generally lay claim to icon status. Bartl’s Egerland tries hard to overturn this impression. It disseminates ruin imagery to depict the wreckage that was taking place in the heart of the Continent, to expand upon the limits of photographic realism, and, in the end, to conjure up a new Cold War reality, lending

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FIGURE 3. “View from the market-place to the ‘Bindergasse.’ Ruins upon ruins.” From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 248. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

legitimacy and gravitas to the prayer wall. To do all of that was by no means an easy task. Egerland insists that the smoke from Cold War battlegrounds rose not only over locales remote from the European heartland. In the author’s opinion, the area to the immediate east of the Iron Curtain matches, if not rivals, the confl ict’s frontlines on faraway continents. What is more, Bartl’s Egerland claims for itself the kind of imagery commonly associated with the postwar era (fig. 3). An illustrated narrative of the thenand-now of a former German Heimat, the book captures not only the transformation of its immediate subject, the Egerland, it also testifies to the photographic chronicle of destruction as a genre in transition, one that, as Bartl deploys it, trespasses the boundaries of what until then had belonged to the postwar rubble aesthetic. The author shows some awareness of this transgression. Instead of putting together a guidebook for a virtual journey from ruins to renewal, Bartl employs Egerland to flesh out the ambivalence of the vocabulary of visual rubble and, concurrently, to underscore the difficulty

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of reattributing it. In his project of reaching for the ruins to validate the prayer wall there is a felt need for a clearer defi nition of postwar and Cold War idioms. Of course, to claim that Bartl’s efforts launch a concerted search for the visual lexicon of the Cold War on the Continent would be a gross overstatement. Yet, his work undoubtedly fosters the view that at stake is a new chapter in history—a chapter to which the author and his countrymen are eager to contribute.

Speaking for the Ruins Egerland, complete with a dedication, preface, introduction, and lengthy captions in three languages, may strike one as an odd site for reflection on the intersections between “postwar” and “Cold War.” Like other narratives produced by Sudeten Germans after 1945 to account for their twentieth-century tribulations, Bartl’s abounds in the clichés lifted from the expellee parlance of the time. From the book’s preface (here quoted, along with captions, in Bartl’s own less-than-idiomatic English) we learn that the “robbed territories of German East . . . stay unpopulated and turn steppe,” while the rest of Germany is “overcrowded.” The wilderness motif, encountered earlier in this chapter, is recurrent and seems purposefully chosen. Bartl’s introduction goes on to explain the role of Bohemia’s German population in the centuries-long cultivation of Heimat’s Edenic landscape (formulaically described as the “Garden of God,” 17), their gradual disenfranchisement following the proclamation of the state of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and their wrongful expulsion in the aftermath of World War II. By peppering his collection with statistical data on the industry, education, and the population of the area—factual detours common in expellee Heimat chronicles (Heimatbücher)—Bartl aims to show that a “landscape [once] blessed by nature” now appears cursed. 35 The Egerland’s former German residents, whose numbers Bartl estimates at 803,300—described as cosmopolitan yet beholden to tradition, religious yet not overly pious—emerge as the antithesis to the area’s Czech population (19). While the Germans appear as talented musicians, dedicated industry pioneers, and enthusiastic teachers, the Czechs are depicted as little more than “servants, [resort] water-girls, room maidens, waiters, [and] porters” (18–19). Premised upon the forced departure of the supposedly hard-working German folk, the book’s opening lines

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bemoan a paradise doubly lost, for the author’s expelled peers and for the rest of the “civilized world.” His book, Bartl explains, is the “fi rst attempt to give . . .] a real and objective (through incorruptibility of pictures) image of what has been done and is still done fi fteen years after expulsion” (17). This “incorruptible” evidence is at the core of the publication. Pictorial proof of Heimat’s heyday and of its subsequent erosion takes up over three hundred pages densely fi lled with hundreds of illustrations; only twenty-two pages contain text alone. Included are maps, nineteenthcentury genre prints, facsimiles of historical documents, paintings, and postcards with views of local landmarks. The pictures span a range of topics, from ethnographic commentary to the troubled Czech–German relationship, and the layout repeatedly requires readers to rotate the book, switching between images vertical and horizontal. Although it is ostensibly organized into sections on the area’s history, folklore, historic landmarks and monuments, famous visitors, and crafts and industries, among others, the book also embraces a potpourri of scattered themes. Mentioned once in their proper sections, these motifs tend to pop up elsewhere as well. The photographs profi le subjects as diverse and haphazard as grazing cows; wool-spinners; lace-makers, glass-makers, and violin-makers; busts of clerics and statesmen; the exteriors and interiors of monasteries, nunneries, and pilgrimage churches; pewter tableware; porcelain tea sets; early twentieth-century bagpipers; traditional weddings; Easter customs; folk dances; and, for good measure, several monuments to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Portraits of the region’s illustrious sons and visitors, such as the architect Balthasar Neumann, the military strategist Albrecht von Wallenstein, and the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, illustrate the book’s encyclopedic reach. Center stage, however, belongs to amateur snapshots and a handful of professional photographs of Heimat taken before and after 1945, which were culled by Bartl from expellee periodicals or borrowed from various other publishers’ archives. Rehearsing the dynamic of his foreword, Bartl arranges his narrative collage in a tragic crescendo. The eclogue-like praise of the once-idyllic fields, “rich healing-waters,” and occasional towns of Bartl’s unmistakably rural Heimat that appear on the fi rst two hundred pages segues into a dark epitaph for “a country, which was giving its former . . . inhabitants food and sufficient existence, [yet] is almost fallow today” (17) on the following hundred pages. The gloomy mood invoked by Bartl’s photo-

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graphic fi ndings is assuaged only in the fi nal twenty-page section, which profi les the life of the region’s expellees in the Federal Republic. Brimfull with photographs of folk costumes and Heimat reenactments at festivities and congresses in and beyond Vienna, Berlin, or Regensburg, the book’s conclusion posits that, while the Egerland may be dying, its expelled former German residents carry its torch. Instead of building on the conventions of the local before-and-after chronicle, a genre established among and beloved by Heimat custodians and tourism proponents in and beyond Germany, Bartl’s volume breaks with the logic of such narratives in two significant ways. The fi rst break concerns his reversal of the valence of “before” and “after.” Documentations of “then” and “now” commonly revel in the endearing clutter of a bygone era resplendent with communal values, virginal landscapes, or cozy streets. Yet, at the same time, they assure the reader that such old-fashioned comforts have not been given up in vain, but traded, instead, for modernity’s most worthwhile innovations. Josef Ruff’s Carlsbad as It Was and Is (1904), for instance, not only leaves no doubt about that town’s continued existence, it also takes note of its multiple improvements. A resort physician by trade, Ruff is eager to demonstrate that Carlsbad as it “is” is certainly better than it once was. An electrified year-round operation, it has more places of worship, more surgical wards, more cutting-edge therapeutic appliances, more charitable institutions, and even more baked goods than it once had. 36 The town’s “waterworks, gasworks, heating plants, spring salt works, and mineral water circulation system” are the “most modern facilities of their kind.”37 In Bartl’s Egerland, however, “before” and “after” mean just the opposite. “After,” in particular, conveys deterioration: modern-day advances destroy rather than ameliorate the landscape. Related to this is the second break: the deferral of any optimistic fi nal accord that might hint at the possibility of improvement, and the subsequent transfer of the Heimat culture to a different place altogether. Usually, German before-and-after chronicles of wartime destruction provide a postscript that communicates a promise of renewal and envisions a more hopeful “after” for the wiped-out terrain. In these works, rubble belongs to the past, whereas reconstruction defi nes the present—so much so that Sebald memorably bemoaned the “second liquidation of one’s own history” instituted by such future-oriented manifestos. 38 Yet the closing of Bartl’s volume, in contrast to such postwar chronicles as those of Richard Peter or Hermann Claasen, does not script a redemp-

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tive narrative for the region itself. Egerland does not boast an epilogue that would fi ll in, even if imaginatively, the gaping holes between the crumbling houses or put farmers back to work in Heimat’s fields. On site, there is no “after.” Instead, the “palliative . . . coverup through the mechanism of architecture,” as Anthony Vidler describes the postwar urge to rebuild, occurs in the West. 39 There, costume-clad Egerlanders, as the sampling of their post-expulsion pageantry proves on the last twenty pages, get ready to pick up the baton. Thanks to the prospect of the Egerland’s relocation from East to West, Bartl’s volume does not launch into a melancholic disavowal of the eastern landscape’s drastic changes. Unlike compilers of the expellee Heimatbücher—retrospective chronicles and “fi nite narratives” that usually stop history’s clocks circa 1945—Bartl refuses to arrest time and adamantly pursues images of decline.40 Only a year earlier, a comparable book on Marienbad limited its illustrations to “fi fty images from [the] most beautiful times.”41 In Bartl’s Egerland, however, the course of time knows no halt. Heimat, in his account, is anything but redolent of mothballs: it is dramatically current. The high-resolution images of its utter decline, it is worth recalling, bode well for the icon curtain and, eventually, the prayer wall. As if to underscore the extent to which things are falling apart, Bartl’s own endeavor performs the ruined state of its subject matter. The book, by the author’s own admission, is a highly fragmented assemblage. Collecting “documentary support,” he explains in his convoluted English, “was not easy”: In regard of the scattered lodgings of our fellow-countrymen, who were at expulsion from home robbed of their literal property, the contents of pictures of the book was to be imperfect work, although material had been also brought out of the home country in manners not just without danger. But it is to be guessed that the contents of the book will be sufficient to bring the shaking problem to the eyes of some politicians. (n.p.)

Medial inconsistency, to which the following three factors contribute most significantly, underscores the album’s alleged “imperfection.” First, the photographic body lacks the systematic vantage points commonly associated with chronicles of then-and-now. Bartl’s collection boasts relatively few photographic before-and-after double-takes from closely matched camera angles. Some locales on its pages exist only “after” but

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not “before,” as the formal convention would have it, or vice versa. Others capture corners that are similar but by no means identical. Occasionally, past and present are contrasted in views of two completely different parts of a town or village. Such imbalance, Bartl points out, is of the era’s own making. Cold War restrictions on mobility, he explains, have limited the range of images at his disposal. We should, it follows, attribute the incongruities to political inevitabilities rather than aesthetic choice or authorial intent. Second, as further analysis spells out, Bartl’s predicament is specifically visual. As chapter 3 will attest, his traveling peers relied on words to describe the “great ruins . . . at the border” and accomplished this without much ado.42 Abundant illustrations, one would expect, would only further this goal—but not in Bartl’s case. If ordinarily a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, the photographs selected to represent the Egerland in ruins, it turns out, require nearly as many words to get the point across. On their own, the author realizes, they fall short of conveying the volume’s message: their eloquence is null when it comes to indexing the Cold War. Alas, Bartl’s images cannot speak for themselves. Or rather, they speak a different—postwar—language, thus pushing the author beyond the confi nes of the photographic frame. They force him to undertake multiple verbal excursions and to contend with the “transhistorical iconography of decay and catastrophe” in order to put a date on the Egerland’s ruins. Bartl wants his readers/viewers to forget about “the iconic wreckage of ages” that tends to muddle our ability to perceive ruins in their proper context. To aid us, he speaks for the images in the hope that his “intense compensatory discursive activity” will prevent the slippage of meaning and stake out the boundary between the postwar era and the Cold War.43 Finally, the book evinces little authorial consistency. Although some photographers of Germany’s postwar ruins incorporated images taken by others into their collections (e.g., Peter), Bartl, strikingly, does not once take up a camera to look at his Heimat through a viewfi nder. He is never the photographer detached from his subject matter by the proverbially cold and disembodied technologies of picture-taking.44 His distance from the lens affords a sentimental glance upon Heimat. The former falls not only beyond any specific photographic frame, but at times beyond the photographic medium itself. Let us see how. Notably, the fi rst image of the compilation is not a photograph, but a

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FIGURE 4. Oswald Voh, Lost Heimat. From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 31. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

woodblock print that enables just such a glance: Lost Heimat, by the expellee artist Oswald Voh (fig. 4). Although its title may suggest otherwise, the image is only secondarily about Heimat. In this image, the rolling hills, tidy farmhouses, and picket fences are confi ned to the background, while the foreground belongs to a large figure of an aging expellee suspended in midair, as if hovering over the “lost Heimat,” his back to the viewer, his hands bound behind his back. Instead of illustrating the common motif of the fl ight from Heimat, Voh thematizes a rather surreal fl ight over Heimat that appears proximate and yet is as infi nitely distant and unattainable as a dream. On the surface, Voh’s print offers a literal rendering of the political view that Sudeten Germans had their hands tied with regard to the present and future of their homeland. All they can do, Voh appears to suggest, is look. Yet the figure is anything but a passive onlooker, a lone consumer of a Debordian spectacle in which sight has entirely supplanted grasp, figuratively as well as physically.45 He embodies an emotionally inflected viewing position, both describing Bartl’s own editorial standpoint and stipulating a vantage point for the reader/viewer. The placement of the print

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at the opening of Bartl’s pictorial narrative is especially important because the image proffers the kind of perspective that none of the photographs do. We are alternately invited to look at Heimat through the eyes of the flying figure, down and along the starkly vertical axis, and to contemplate both him and his Heimat looking sideways, from a lateral elevation. Heimat’s bird’s-eye view is particularly significant precisely because it is uncharacteristic of the photographs in the volume, nearly always taken on the ground and usually situating their objects at eye level. Furthermore, the perspective within the print and the work’s strategic location at the opening of the book suggest that Bartl is attempting more than to merely illustrate the melancholic fi xation on Heimat that is so closely associated with the expellee culture. The glance upon Heimat from above foreshadows the book’s key theme of destruction. It alludes to the “airman’s vision,” fundamental for areal photography of wartime and postwar ruination, and references two distinct types of shots in particular.46 Overhead shots, taken from military reconnaissance planes, delivered abstract patterns of Germany’s (and Europe’s) destroyed remains, otherwise “unintelligible to a ‘terrestrial’ eye.” In contrast, oblique lateral shots “provided the public with a picture of urban devastation at a glance.”47 By combining both, Bartl’s cursory citation of areal photography channeled through Voh’s print reinscribes Heimat in the discourse on ruins. “How can a landscape of rubble become a site of Heimat?” Eric Rentschler’s rhetorical question maps a key dilemma faced by protagonists in rubble fi lms of the postwar years. Bartl’s quandary is the exact opposite: How is it possible to present Heimat, this supposedly untouched oasis, as the locus of rubble? If a bombed-out postwar metropolis could conceivably become a “homeland, a synthesis of StadtLand-Kultur, of modernity and nature,” what could possibly be in store for a landscape that was rural to begin with?48 How could one persuasively index its collapse? As if to answer these questions, Bartl falls back on words. The ruins that concern him, he insists, are not those of World War II, and the photographs in his collection do not unfurl big-city detritus in panoramic shots. All “this,” his captions tirelessly admonish, referring to the wreckage, “is not due to the consequences of the last war” (225). Bartl’s refrain anticipates his epigone’s summary that “war destruction was comparably insignificant in West Bohemia. More serious damage was done by the consequences of the expulsion . . . and . . . the setting up of the death strip.”49

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“The last war,” indeed, maintains a fraught presence in the book. On the one hand, the expression attests to the assiduous currency of postwar imagery. On the other, Bartl’s point is precisely that the “last war” was not the last. His on-the-ground views of quietly crumbling towns and villages communicate a distinct pace that the author would like us to associate with the new confl ict. If the Cold War brings about ruins, his volume implies, it is anything but a “battleless battlefield.”50 Bartl’s rural ruins are thus infi nitely more than an outcome of environmental decline in Communist-run East Central Europe, which Sudeten German then-and-now books would later highlight. These volumes, as Eagle Glassheim observes, forged a link between Bohemia’s ecological decline, depopulation, and the shortcomings of industry, on the one hand, and the expulsion of the ethnic German residents after 1945, on the other. By uprooting “organic” German settlements, so goes their narrative, the Czechoslovak state enforced “an inorganic process of resettlement” that was responsible for the resulting “Heimat-deficit.”51 Bartl’s album is more than a mere prototype for such compilations. Although the author’s editorial work takes root in the expellee agenda, it also makes him an unwitting explorer of the limits of mimesis. As the century-long success story of the Egerland gives way to its less-than-glamorous present circa 1959, Bartl’s subject matter and the photographs at his disposal necessitate broad representational questions. First, what exactly is Heimat in ruins and how can Bartl convey its various modalities of dilapidation most graphically and succinctly to a foreign audience? Second, how exactly ought one steer the reader’s attention away from associating images of ruins with the consequences of World War II and instead draw it to the less graphic destruction wrought by the new era? Bartl’s extensive verbal interventions, dictated by these two main concerns, compensate for the silence of his images.

The Failure of Photography’s Indexicality But fi rst, why can neither the ruins as a seemingly unequivocal trace of wartime destruction nor photography as an allegedly eloquent medium testify without a commentary? To answer this question, let us examine how exactly the author guides his reader/viewer toward the theme of destruction. This process is gradual. Remarkably, aside from Voh’s print, few images on the fi rst two hundred pages anticipate Bartl’s proper focus

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on ruins or foreshadow his emphatic postulation of a Heimat in decline, prevalent in the second part of the volume. Neither does the layout always attune the reader to the dynamic of “then” and “now.” Concerned with accommodating as much visual material as possible, Bartl abandons the canonical side-by-side format. Instead, the placement of the photographs seems almost erratic; any given page can feature between two and five photographs of one or more sites. Consequently, the density of picturing Heimat’s dilapidated state in the second half of the book appears unmediated. Little prepares the reader to detect discrepancies between the Egerland’s past and its present; neither are such nuances always obvious to a non-Sudeten German. Bartl’s extensive commentary moderates this abrupt shift from lull to destruction. There is, indeed, a kind of spatial logic to Bartl’s lengthy perambulations through the Egerland’s folk arts and geography. After all, they deliver his ostensibly mixed audience to familiar locales and thus facilitate communicating the author’s central concerns in the second part of the volume. To unravel the narrative of Heimat’s decay, Bartl begins with a map, which mirrors the book’s opening. It represents the “Egerland, ‘the land of curative springs’” and identifies each resort’s medicinal strengths. Readers, however, need not agonize over the location of where to take their rheumatism, gout, or neuralgia. Bartl makes the choice for them by steering his audience toward Carlsbad, a resort town said to have hosted luminaries from Peter the Great to Bismarck, from Goethe to Marx, from Bach to Brahms. Its fi rst views are areal. Again, they simultaneously set up a triumphant entry à la Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and foreshadow the town’s approaching downfall. Before erosion sets in, we are invited to admire old Carlsbad’s views, walk its clean, well-groomed streets, and take pleasure in its theaters, churches, and majestic spa colonnades. In particular, the “world-famous Hotel Pupp” (205), an international icon of decadent grandeur (and, as Wes Anderson’s fi lm The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) proves, also a popular culture icon), becomes Bartl’s symbolic vantage point for explicating, contemplating, and illustrating Heimat’s downturn. Already as Bartl showers his reader with images of Carlsbad in its glory days, he is poised to launch into a systematic exposure of its present decline. On the page across from the photographs of the Sprudel, Carlsbad’s most spectacular mineral water fountain, the author crowds three images of depopulated streets and “ruined houses [that] caused [gaps in construction].” To demarcate the transition from heyday to de-

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cay, Bartl switches the tense of his captions: “Empty streets show that Karlsbad ‘has once been’ world health-resort” (fig. 5). From this point, images of ruins dominate the narrative. The Hotel Pupp, the future backdrop for the fi lm adaptation of Ian Fleming’s quintessential Cold War story, Casino Royale, coincidentally becomes the stage from which Bartl begins projecting what he perceives to be the confl ict’s key vignettes. He zooms in on the towns fi rst. On the streets of Carlsbad in particular, Bartl suggests, the symptoms of gradual erosion are not limited to architecture. Decline is anthropomorphic, but not because the stones reflect a human drama or possess a character of their own, as is the case in postwar rubble fi lms. 52 Rather, the demographic mix-up embodies, in Bartl’s opinion, the beginning of the end by bringing to light Heimat’s uncanny side. Most immediately, the author draws our attention to the supposed changes in the makeup of the town’s inhabitants and visitors. Rife with racial and ethnic stereotypes now bolstered by the antiEastern European sentiment of the Cold War era, Bartl’s account pursues a physiognomic scrutiny of what he terms the “‘cure guests’ (Kurgäste) of today” (213). Babushka-wearing peasant women point to the spa’s déclassé present; dark-haired and olive-skinned men evoke the menace of reverse colonization by the Eastern Other (213); “the ‘great’ Czech” in a suit and trench coat hugging “the ‘little’ Russian” boy dressed in Soviet military uniform allude to the all-pervasiveness of Soviet control in the area (214). These new faces strike Bartl as graphic enough to make him abandon his otherwise detailed editorial interventions and, for the fi rst and only time, leave it to the images to convey “what words cannot describe” (213). Extending the disquieting diversity of faces are road and store signs in Czech and Russian (215). An indubitable signal of downturn in Bartl’s view, their arrows point in familiar directions yet are disorientingly devoid of German references. As one contemporary noted, “The history of Carlsbad, the German world resort town,” ended in 1945. 53 Yet its inglorious Cold War history, Bartl purports, was just beginning. What exactly are Cold War ruins? They are not, as we might expect, the fallout-dusted shards of glass, concrete, and steel through which families trek in Western cautionary tales such as The Day After (1983). Their temporality is peculiar, as they neither look back nor face forward. They neither punctuate the earlier catastrophe’s aftermath nor forecast another cataclysm’s impending conclusion. Throughout, Bartl is an antipode of the Benjaminian angel of history who is famously caught

FIGURE 5. Carlsbad today. From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 211. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

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between two heaps of debris—the visible aftermath of past catastrophes and the anticipated residue of relentless advancement. Neither is of interest to the author, whose implicit question is: Why wait for the dénouement if already the beginning—the fi rst decade of the confl ict— proffers more than enough evidence? In contrast to photography of postwar rubble, which drew a line behind the recent past to tally the losses and anticipate a recovery, Bartl’s views of Cold War ruins preempt the confl ict’s resolution. Without looking ahead, they exploit the decidedly non-nuclear imaginary to alert the reader to the persistence of conventional destruction and decay amid anticipatory atomic-age fears. Cold War ruins are, emphatically, not fragments of the past recovered in the present. They are not what Georg Simmel described as “a present form of a past life.”54 As the structural flow of Bartl’s volume bespeaks, they have no place in what was “then.” In this Egerland, ruins of the past do not exist—as we have seen, the landscape prior to 1945 is painted as nothing short of paradisaical. For that, however, the ruins of the present are made all the more prominent. As the volume’s title announces, they constitute the “now.” By reducing decline’s temporality to the present, by diverting attention from pastness and futurity alike, Bartl identifies destruction as an ongoing condition that slowly unfolds before our eyes. As his selection of images proposes, on the Continent, the Cold War accomplishes its destructive task as we speak. Its ostensible lack of the news-making potential of an air war, let alone atomic fi reballs or mushroom clouds, makes it all the more pernicious. Bartl’s main challenge, however, remains the failure of photography’s indexicality. His selection of images has to capture the present. Instead, it is rife with potent reminders of a recent past. The pictures possess an unambiguous tragic edge, but they overwhelmingly recall a tragedy of another period—World War II and its aftermath. They are icons, but their iconic qualities do not serve the author’s ends. Although they do “authenticate the ‘real,’” as we expect photographs to do, they confusingly suggest another period’s reality. 55 The real, in Bartl’s volume, is chronologically conditioned and therefore not obvious. This predicament does not escape the author. Although Bartl draws on the currency of the postwar ruin, he ultimately has to break with its influence. Ruins of the Cold War can come into their own only outside the “temporal palimpsest” that commonly gives meaning to signs of destruction elsewhere. 56 Therefore, as we move from Bohemia’s spas to a less cosmopolitan location such as Eger (the area’s administrative capital), a page-long commentary

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dissociates the town’s current state from the damages of World War II, noticeable mostly around railways and in industrial production centers. Bartl writes: Eger, formerly a free town of empire and the capital of Egerland is nowadays a dying town. That is not the fault of consequences of the last war. The actual rulers, the Czechs, let the town go to ruin as they do also with other towns and places in Egerland and the whole land of the Sudets. They are not able to populate the robbed territory. Gipsies [sic] and other asocial people having been settled there, fi nished the work of destruction, the Czechs wanted. (225)

Variations on the comment that what we see “is not the last war” punctuate the section dedicated to the Egerland in ruins. They stage a Magrittean confrontation between the visible and the written. In his famous word-and-image paintings, and especially in The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe), René Magritte “plays on the contrast between what is seen as obvious and what the text fi nally comes to deny.”57 Magritte’s words and the attendant pictorial “evidence” quarrel with each other incessantly. The result is a disconnect between words and pictures, on the one hand, and the objects they claim to represent, on the other. Although Bartl relies on a medium with a claim to objectivity, treats his photographs as documents and not artifacts, and places his captions off the image surface, his book communicates a distrust of representation comparable to that expressed in Magritte’s work. The relevance of Cold War ruins becomes manifest in the tension between the reader’s initial association of the photographs with the imagery of World War II and the author’s refutation of this visual legacy. His captions attest to the “last war’s” indelible mark on the Western imaginary. The words, conversely, divert the reader’s attention from the shock effect of that war’s photography, since its lingering impact detracts from the urgency of the author’s Cold War appeal. Bartl’s resignification of the ruins as a marker of the new standoff thus continuously shuttles between two counterpoints. On the one hand, it bespeaks the need to acknowledge the images’ associative World War II provenance. On the other, it attempts to emancipate the pictures from the formidable iconic legacy of this earlier confl ict. Reiterated at three subsequent points further in the volume, Bartl’s Magrittean interludes become one of the book’s emphatic refrains. They also turn into potent tools for producing the desired reality effect—rather than just a reality effect. It is only

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through Bartl’s interventions that the reader gets a grasp of the “horrible documents about the decay of the inner town of Eger, which is—it may be stressed again and again—not the result of the war (Kriegseinwirkungen)” (244). Of course, Bartl himself is not entirely free from associating ruins with the postwar era. After all, often such associations reflect historical facts. Thus, transportation junctions and industrial objects were bombed in 1944 and 1945. Lasting reminders of air raids surround the gateway bridge into Eger, blown up and replaced with a makeshift wooden structure in May 1945, back when US troops were still in the area (230–31). Church steeples had been “victims of incendiary bombs” well before Czechoslovak atheists got to them (254). A similar fate befell the railway station, a “picture from Siberia” by 1959 (272). At times, glimpses of ongoing decay are indistinguishable from the imagery of the war’s aftermath: “broken [window] panes” (247), “streets . . . grown over by grass” (255, 268), and “disintegrating houses” (265) recur at several points. Pairings of photographs showcase broken glass, sliding roof shingles, peeling plaster, collapsing walls, and gaping doorways. Bartl’s description of the downfall as steppe encroachment (Versteppung) echoes not only the age-old vocabulary of German responses to Europe’s East and to Germany’s own deforestation. “Steppes” is also a code word for the flat expanses of burned-out postwar cities. 58 Bartl tries to limit such evocative imagery to but a few illustrations, coincidentally chosen to point to widespread Cold War tropes: the negligence of Czech authorities to pursue reconstruction, or their hostility toward religion. In his words, “The Soviet star [over the entrance to the town hall square] doesn’t conceal the broken [window] panes” (247), and the image of dismembered crucifi xes, described in the opening of the next chapter, “hits the Christians in the whole world” (238). The author’s ultimate goal, however, is to identify more era-specific examples of decline and introduce them to his audience. His ambition is to recuperate photography’s indexical powers and relieve the medium from its dependence on captions. This ambition, as we will see, is short-lived. The specificity of Cold War ruins, according to Bartl, is located in coordinates temporal as well as visual. If pictures of the rubble left behind by air raids captured instantaneous destruction, photographs of erosion behind the Iron Curtain put duration back into the picture. 59 Cold War ruins take more than an instant to manifest themselves; they are, to borrow Simmel’s apt expression, in the state of “perpetual becoming.”60 To

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expose the slow process of decay, Bartl singles out a proper architectural innuendo. In Eger, he suggests, buildings that are collapsing rather than collapsed prevail. Photographs of houses propped up by heavy wooden or metal braces (fig. 6) allude to the torturously retarded tempo of the downfall. More than half a dozen images capture massive roughhewn tree trunks and long wooden boards that extend from one side of the street to another. Fork-like contraptions conjoin the façades on the streets’ opposing sides. The resulting bridges, Bartl insinuates, are not symbols of connectedness. On the contrary, they lay bare the disjointed body of small-town architecture in the midst of the Cold War. Their lines run in disruptive diagonals alien to the town’s axial fabric, as they cross spaces midway and fragment open passages. House façades, Bartl notes acerbically, “have to support themselves” after “Czechs and Gypsies sawed up the roof beams for wood” (241). Such vignettes of the Egerland’s gradual disintegration do not merely follow the European canon of ruin imagery since the Renaissance. On the contrary, they announce a departure from one of its pillars: the ennobling aura around the time-honored, gracefully aging classical ruins. Egerland questions the relevance of these aesthetic legacies to its Cold War present. If photographs of the area’s collapse refer to another, bygone era, it is usually to testify to human progress unwound: Roma children loiter in the rubble (251); dirt roads supplant the pavement; crude wooden structures take the place of stone buildings; depopulated “Siberian” landscapes glumly greet the viewer (273); and overall “Balkanic” conditions prevail (311). At a comfortable physical distance to the Cold War barrier, Bartl’s anti-aesthetic of ruins accomplishes what the Iron Curtain travelers I cite in chapter 3 will not bring themselves to do in the border’s proximity: it declares Heimat beyond repair. The omnipresent scaffolding (fig. 6) does not signal reconstruction: the Egerland, according to Bartl, is “a ruin hardly to be saved” (234) and a habitus “irretrievably lost” (261). The few Czechoslovak “attempts at rescue” are but belated and superficial touch-ups (245). The author’s captions imply that the Egerland’s Cold War remains, unlike the ruins of World War II, are there to stay. In his commentary, their permanence is little short of disgraceful. The intensity of Bartl’s tone does not abate once we take symbolic leave of Eger—Bartl’s last “urban” spread appropriately pictures a railway station (272)—and enter the countryside. On the contrary, the move into the rural core of Heimat, with its “blown-up farms” (281) and

FIGURE 6. “The upper and the lower ‘Steingasse.’ It is forbidden to enter there on account of the downfalling houses.” From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 269. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

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“missing houses” (298), becomes the book’s pictorial and affective pivot. The challenge, however, is how to represent absence and emphasize the natural destruction already set in nature, rather than a bombed-out city. Along the country roads the materiality of ruins becomes ever more transient. Within a mere decade, as we are about to discover, the remains of Sudeten German villages fade into their surroundings to the point of being completely indiscernible. In Bartl’s countryside, noticing the ruins is not so much a question of a simultaneous “looking and looking away” that, in Sebald’s famous formulation, characterized the German lack of engagement with the traces of bombing.61 Rather, it alternates between seeing everything (i.e., the vastness of destruction) and nothing (i.e., the resulting emptiness), to draw on Hilton Als’s reflections on the wipedout vistas of post-atomic Japan.62 To tip the scale in favor of seeing more rather than less, Bartl marks the transition to the countryside by “dropping” the Iron Curtain—that is, by reproducing a photograph of the barrier for the first time. The material presence of the fence both explains the ruins’ traceless elimination and compensates for their lack of visibility. Yet the descent of the Iron Curtain as we see it in Egerland is not altogether sudden. Bartl approaches the divide by introducing his audience to the borderland in general terms fi rst. For the sake of a brief prelude, he pairs a picture of a border-crossing to Eger prior to the expulsion with a photograph of the Czechoslovak–German border taken around the same environs about five years later (fig. 7). In this relatively early snapshot, the ruins are still quite prominent. The photograph alerts the viewer to the “blown up houses and farms . . . allover to see,” once part of a Sudeten German settlement and now a no man’s land (277). A West German border guard and two ruin gazers— possibly Iron Curtain travelers of the kind described in chapter 3—study the wreckage to the east of the divide. And although Bartl proposes that these “ruins give a shocking appearance to the whole landscape, appealing to anyones [sic] emotions” (277), the remains resemble Simmel’s “heap of stone” (a shapeless and rather meaningless pile of detritus) more closely than remnants made “meaningful, accessible, differentiated” by nature’s reconquest.63 Invoking the Iron Curtain, Bartl seems to believe, can restore meaning to the pile’s appearance and out nature’s idyll as deceptive. This is the task of the following image, where a close-up of thick logs right across the visual field becomes doubly menacing under the bold

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FIGURE 7. “Barricades . . . before Eger.” From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 277. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

trilingual section title, “The Iron Curtain” (fig. 8). Attached to diagonal planks, the trunks—a muffled echo of the aforesaid wilderness motif— deliver an absurdly magnified snippet of the divide, canceling out the landscape behind it. Once part of nature, they now appear to be nailed into submission, suggesting just how disconcertingly easy it can be to requisition the wild and free forests for the benefit of political control. Quite in the spirit of this message, the composition exudes an oppressive air: the viewer, placed at eye level with and immediately in front of the barrier, directly beneath a watchtower on the other side, is a vicarious subject of surveillance. Bartl launches into yet another refrain to maximize the impact of the photograph and preface the upcoming portrayal of deserted Sudeten German villages along the divide: Barricades, loaded electric wires, watch towers and the plowed dead zone separate the people of Egerland from their inherited home country. What happened there during the last years, how towns, villages and farms were destroyed, were made level with the ground, the pictures show it. Hundred times as many could be published in this book, if there were only place for them. Again and again it has to be called to attention that this destruction was not caused by war. (278)

FIGURE 8. “Barricades, loaded electric wires, watch towers and the plowed dead zone separate the people of Egerland from their inherited home country.” From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 278. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

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The destruction of rural Heimat, as the captioned image tries to make clear, is not merely an outcome of the historically indeterminate “vandalism of the Czechs,” which Sudeten German authors typically link to varied instances of strife across centuries (313). The crude logs that embody the still-provisional materiality of the Iron Curtain in the 1950s graphically suggest that the Cold War is the proper context for understanding the scale, place, time, and appearance of destruction pictured in the volume. Despite the claim that “this destruction was not caused by war,” by which Bartl, as usual, means World War II, his captions aspire to portray the ongoing confl ict as precisely that: a war with its casualties. Following this point, “ruin” (Ruine) and “rubble” (Trümmer) (312) come up far more frequently, as if to underscore the area’s demotion to a smattering of “ruin sites” (296). Nowhere are Bartl’s visuals as indexically vague as out in the countryside, where “dying farms” (279) or “fully destroyed” villages (300) are the order of the day. The irony of such rural Cold War ruinscapes is that their most egregious transformations escape the viewer unfamiliar with the area. Against the pastoral backdrop, nature’s recapture of the human environment lacks the high-contrast drama of trees blossoming atop big-city rubble. Instead, the debris inconspicuously dissolves into the meadows, forest clearings, or valleys. The snow-dusted farmhouses of Markhausen, a village near Graslitz/Kraslice, give way to a sunlit valley that, while depopulated, looks even more verdant and cheerful than before (298). In Hammermühle, another hamlet, what used to be a neat farmhouse in 1945 turns into a desolate ruin in 1948 yet becomes a strangely beatific forest clearing by 1956 (280). To complete the bucolic parody, a small farm near Tüppelsgrün, supposedly destroyed without a trace, now hosts a herd of peacefully grazing goats (313). In each case, the “cosmic tragedy” unleashed by the victory of natural forces over the work of man would be lost on the viewer were it not for Bartl’s captions.64

Coda: The Treachery of Images Compelled to fumble for words, Bartl calls into question the special status of analog photography among the other visual arts, a status rooted in its physical connection to the referent. To recall Roland Barthes’s dictum, “By nature, the Photograph . . . has something tautological about it:

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a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent within itself.”65 Not so in Bartl’s volume. On the contrary, the difficulty of picturing destruction in the Central Europe of the late 1950s proves that the camera delivers images no less fickle and interpretable than any other medium. The resulting editorial interventions have ramifications not solely medial but also political. To understand why, in conclusion, let us take a look at the potential of the caption, significant but rarely mentioned in photography criticism. What can a sentence, let alone a few words, accomplish? Some day, as Walter Benjamin suggests in his vision of photography’s future, in the age of mechanical reproduction with its overabundance of proliferating visuals, our ability to think associatively may run into a blind alley. In that case, pictures will grow ever more reliant on words, and authoritative inscription (Beschriftung) is “bound to become the most essential component of the photograph.” Or perhaps, if we are to believe Susan Sontag, this day has already arrived: “Whether the photograph is understood as a naïve object or the work of an experienced artificer, its meaning—and the viewer’s response—depends on how the picture is identified or misidentified; that is, on words.”66 To be sure, Benjamin’s prophecy of the imminent prevalence of the text over the once indomitable photographic image, and its fulfi llment in Sontag, chart new horizons of authentication. But they also presume the vastly expanded possibilities of interpretive exploitation in which the caption can participate. By yoking together word and image, Egerland pivots on this double bind: the captions simultaneously substantiate the sad state of Heimat and manipulate the reader into adopting the author’s perspective. No photographic image, their presence suggests, is “incorruptible.” Ultimately, Bartl’s captioned photographs are indeed oddly similar to Magritte’s word-and-image canvases. They warn not only of Heimat’s slow demise, of the adverse effects of Communist rule in East Central Europe, or of the dangers posed by the political, physical, or ideological divide between the blocs; above all, they caution us against the treachery of images. As such, ruins of the Cold War may well exist only in Bartl’s collection. Of course, this is not to say that the razed villages, crumbling houses, and dilapidated churches as we see them in the volume’s second part were not real—they were. Yet, without Bartl they would have existed in a semiotic vacuum. Their reality would have been something other than a Cold War reality. That is to say, Egerland is tasked not

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merely with depicting but also with producing Cold War ruins. This debris’ association with the ongoing confl ict is Bartl’s own: he goes to great lengths to label them, and his book’s context and captions transform the Egerland into a Cold War front. Just as with the religious images described in the following chapter, these icons are not made from scratch— they are repurposed. And without repurposing, as we will see, neither the icon curtain nor its consolidation into the continuous prayer wall would have been possible. To move away from these structures’ preconditions to their emergence, to track the foundational processes of reuse, let us begin with yet another image from Bartl’s volume—once again, our gateway to a new theme.

Chapter Two

Cornerstones Iconoclasm and the Making of the Prayer Wall The Periphery Becomes the Center

O

n a quiet town street, a young man in a baggy suit and beret is impishly smiling at the camera (fig. 9). His left foot curves upward to suggest a brisk and, to judge from his expression, rather pleasant walk. As he strides into the frame, his dark outfit offsets the picture’s washedout grays and whites to claim a focal position, the point toward which our eyes are drawn fi rst. Yet we soon realize that the man is neither in the physical center of the snapshot nor in its foreground. In front of him, two light-toned bars segment his figure at the waistline, disrupt the dynamic momentum of his entry, and hint that the picture’s thematic focus is elsewhere. One bar, short and thin, is the horizontal handle of a large pushcart, which the ostensible protagonist is holding onto with both hands. The other, long and sinuous, is a life-size arm thrust out of the cart in the direction from which the man has just arrived. A cursory fi rst glance may suggest a family scene—a jovial father pushing his stretching offspring in an old-fashioned buggy. Yet even a casual double-take evinces a jarring contradiction between the cargo and the man’s grin. The projecting arm belongs to a wooden Jesus figure, probably dismantled from a large crucifi x in one of the town’s churches. Although this figure faces the viewer, its anguished visage is averted from the camera as if to decry the scene. And an eerie scene it is. At the head of the cart, at least two other such bodies are sandwiched together with little respect for their delicate polychrome coating. Their arms, some fi ngers missing, mournfully rise in the air in a parody of an embrace gone awry. Their tilted heads, one bowing down the front of the

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figure 9. “A shaking contemporary image that hits the Christians in the whole world.” From Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 238. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

bulky vehicle, touch each other as if in resignation. The subject matter of the image thus only crystallizes at the intersection of two confl icting expressions: the young man’s smirk and the doleful, half-closed eyes on the faces atop the stiff bodies on their way to a dump or fi re. The man’s dark clothing only underscores the sinister mood. Still more somber is the photograph’s nod to the iconography of wartime and postwar gloom, when carts full of human bodies seized by rigor mortis were wheeled to mass graves all over Central and Eastern Europe. This image, however, is not a document of extermination. The crushed wooden rumps overlap to form a rough-hewn vignette of the strained religious life in Eastern Europe’s Communist borderlands in the 1950s, observable and interpretable through a Western lens, which is this chapter’s primary focus. From this vantage point, the composition restages

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the crucifi xion motif stripped down to the bare bones: the alleged tormentor’s grin looms triumphantly over the Jesuses’ ravaged bodies as it allegorically suggests religion’s much dreaded all-out defeat. It was feared that this defeat would take root in the East and then seed in the West—unless the Cold War border could stop it. This chapter investigates what lay believers, locals as well as expellees, did to stave off such an undesirable turn of events and how the clerical powers-that-be curated those efforts. Clearly, portraying the Eastern Bloc’s attack on religion and its institutions required more than one jettisoned Jesus. In the above photograph from Bartl’s Egerland, the magnitude of the threat was made incarnate in the layered heap of several wooden bodies in disuse. With the help of such graphic imagery, occasionally embellished by the rumors and legends recounted in this chapter, the emerging Iron Curtain was speedily incorporated into the internationally recognizable arsenal of Christian martyrology. And thanks to the evidentiary force of such images, the quiet border between Czechoslovakia and West Germany would become a section of the Iron Curtain where the greatest battle— that for the people’s minds—would be fought. For local believers, native and expellee alike, recognition of this epic battle was tantamount to recognition of their own symbolic move from periphery to center. There were parallels on the other side of the border as well, where the Czechoslovak government sought to promote the depopulated borderlands as a new “California rather than [the remote] Klondike.”1 On the West German side, the struggle offered a chance to transform the region’s halfforgotten and economically struggling farmers, wood-loggers, and glassblowers into the foremost guardians of Christian integrity along the West’s eastern limit. In this case, the most vivid testimonies to Czechoslovak iconoclasm were not photographs. They were actual objects, although photography remained a key tool for their dissemination. Several battered religious images had been discovered right at the Iron Curtain in the early 1950s. These were the objects that would pave the way for a recalibrated terrain of popular piety along the edge of the Western bloc, made incarnate in the Icon Curtain and the prayer wall. Here, religious practices, many of them specific to the forest’s environs, contributed to the materiality of the emergent barrier. They assured that the landscape of the Iron Curtain hosted much more than a series of military obstacles. To begin reviewing these developments, let us, once again, consult

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Bartl’s book, this time not as a bible of Central Europe’s Cold War–era decline, but as a laboratory for forging a casual snapshot of a street in Eger into carefully composed and ideologically saturated proof of midcentury Eastern Bloc iconoclasm. Bartl’s book is unambiguous about the man in the photograph being either Czech or Slovak and about the Jesuses’ disposable bodies being German. Yet, given the political climate of the time, to code the figures’ twice-broken limbs as narrowly ethnic and the scene as a local episode in the extended Czech–German confl ict would have been myopic. Bartl was aware of that, since his intended international audience would have been neither overwhelmingly empathetic toward the (Sudeten) Germanness of the Jesuses’ fractured bodies nor genuinely invested in reviewing the troubled Czech–German accounts. To give the photograph the utmost impact, Bartl needed to uncouple it from the drawn-out confrontation between two nationalities and embed it in a broader framework. His task was to put a small provincial incident—a grinning Czech worker disposing of German religious trappings—on the very large map of Cold War concerns. To this effect, he mobilized a well-known bête noire of Western anticommunism: the East’s attack on Christianity. Nowhere was this attack more palpable, his choice of image suggests, than along the Iron Curtain. Without a doubt, Bartl’s concerns were widely shared by his peers in the Federal Republic. Between the early 1950s and the mid-1980s, thousands of Bartl’s Sudeten German compatriots took it upon themselves to reimagine the remote villages on Bohemia’s western periphery as the center of the burgeoning standoff. This undertaking was not confined to narrative alone. The story of this effort is significant fi rst and foremost because the earliest encounters with iconoclasm at the Iron Curtain had a concrete impact on how the human-ecological dimensions of the borderlands would be redefi ned—on both sides. Already in 1950 and 1951, anticipating the military barrier’s consolidation in the predominantly Catholic area, several iconoclastic incidents laid the cornerstones for this particular borderland’s spatial and architectural adaptation for Western uses: the icon curtain was born. The Bohemian Forest had long been dotted with numerous Catholic shrines of local and regional significance. But the descent of the Iron Curtain disrupted many existing cults, pilgrimage routes, and attendant commercial thoroughfares, such as the so-called Golden Path from Bohemia to the Danube. In the wake of the expulsion, neglect held sway on old Sudeten German cemeteries, and many churches and cha-

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pels were razed or left to sink into the Bohemian Forest. Theater stages, such as that in Höritz/Horˇice na Šumaveˇ, where ethnic Germans once performed their own versions of salvific history, documented by early fi lmmakers, stood empty on the eve of demolition. 2 This recarved sacral landscape befuddled the staunchly Catholic contingent that had nurtured several generations of deeply religious writers and “bards”—Sepp Skalitzky, Johann Andreas Blaha, or Leo Hans Mally—and that considered the authors of Passion plays and latter-day apocalypses as activists for the cause. 3 New sites that would soon arise to the west of the barrier did not merely compensate for those abandoned in the East. The up-andcoming chapels that would constitute the prayer wall would translate the reinforcement of the border into religious idiom. It was, of course, not the fi rst time that faith was called upon to delineate an ideological or geographical boundary: the Piedmontese sacri monti, built along the Alps to ward off the spread of Protestantism in the sixteenth century, count among the best-known European examples.4 And yet the midtwentieth-century string of sites examined here differed from its predecessors in one significant way: in its development, the preoccupation with the changing appearance and manifold functions of the military barrier played as important a role as did religious concerns. The prayer wall took root in visions of how to intermesh the canon of Catholic piety with the confl ict’s strategic needs. Eventually punctuating the course of the divide along more than a hundred miles, the aforementioned sequence of chapels and lookout towers, illustrated in more detail in chapter 4, was both an alternative to and a civilian extension of the military barrier. Of course, obscure Bavarian villages and towns—few will have heard of Furth im Wald, Jägershof, Steinberg, Bärnau, Hatzenreuth, Neualbenreuth, Mitterfi rmiansreut, Mähring, Eschlkam, Rittsteig, or Lackenhäuser—did not make front-page national news. Yet their incorporation into the outlines of the Western bloc brought a perceptible change to these locations. Once largely disjointed, in the fi rst decade of the Cold War these communities coalesced into an entity that lent ostensible cultural cohesion to the western side of the Iron Curtain. No longer merely discrete dots on the map, they now formed a continuum that allowed thousands of Westerners, both natives and expellees alike, to make sense of the Cold War divide on their own terms.

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The pioneers of West German expellee ethnography, Alfred KarasekLanger and Georg A. Schroubek, did not make much of these sites’ Cold War significance. It was not that their proximity to the border had escaped these scholars; rather, it was that neither identified this border as part of the Iron Curtain—and this, not for lack of historical perspective. Their investment in refugee pilgrimages (Flüchtlingswallfahrten) targeted above all the relationship between devotion and the experience of postwar homelessness. It was not the divide itself, but that which lay behind it, that informed their fascination with the new forms of piety. In other words, Heimat was the privileged lens through which they observed the frictions and “curious amalgamations” between the “new” Catholic rituals imported by the expellees and the “old” confessional practices that had been in place for centuries. 5 Pilgrimages to the borderlands, in their view, offered Heimat’s surrogate and “with it, a remedy against longing.”6 Yet, the practitioners of these novel cults and those who had to accommodate them—clerics, local administrators, and border police—saw things differently. For them, the epithets “new” and “old” described more than just Heimat. Beginning in the 1950s, these two adjectives captured the differences in people’s lives before and after the Czechoslovak–West German border became the Iron Curtain. In many ways, “old” aligned with pre–Cold War traditions and practices, whereas “new” reflected an awareness of the extent to which the confl ict had transformed those earlier patterns. Iconoclasm, here used synonymously with “defacement,” counted as an especially egregious and therefore significant intrusion, one that forged an unlikely religious connection between the Sudetenland and the Federal Republic. In 1981, at a yearly festival outside one of the most elaborate of the new borderland chapels, an expellee priest, Josef Donner, retrospectively took stock of the iconoclastic incidents’ corrosive effects and simultaneously affi rmed the link between vandalism in the East and the emerging chain of chapels, lookout towers, and monuments in the West: Looking into the old Heimat, we fi rst had to register how many villages and churches and monuments had been destroyed. Out of faith, love for the Heimat saints and the readiness to make sacrifices we then set to work on constructing new sanctuaries and shrines on this side of the border. In this manner, . . . a prayer wall (Gebetswall) surrounds Bohemia and Moravia.7

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Donner’s description of the new architectural cluster, with its largerthan-life proportions, was symptomatically exaggerated. The prayer wall, as any map would have made obvious, defi ned the outer limits of Czechoslovakia’s west rather than circling its entirety. But it was not the length that mattered—it was the purpose. It was on the western side of the divide, as a colleague of Donner’s would observe three years later, that “the construction of sanctuaries along the border from the Bavarian Forest to Upper Palatinate” became the West’s supposedly palliative answer to the disruptive “bunker-spiked borders and barbed wire” for which the East was held responsible.8 Over time, however, the prayer wall would acquire its own protective function, sheltering Christianity the world over from an alleged Eastern onslaught. The most immediate benefits of such a shield were local. Cementing religion’s physical presence in the borderlands gave believers and clerics an opportunity to reinforce the divide without the state’s direct participation. By considering the sources with which they claimed agency, we can begin to explain how a metaphor reanimated by Winston Churchill in 1946 became an exceedingly versatile blend of fiction and reality for millions of the borderlands’ inhabitants and visitors. Protective connotations were, in the fi rst place, linguistic. Just as the Iron Curtain signified different things to different people, the German term “Wall” harbored a slew of interrelated meanings, with associations both military and civilian. As a rampart (its most literal English equivalent), it spoke to Cold Warriors in search of certainty about the West’s easternmost limits. As a misplaced equivalent of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, it touched the hearts of those who believed that prayers could heal even the gravest rifts. As a simulacrum “substituting for the pilgrimage sites of the old Heimat surrendered to ruin” in the face of the Eastern “politics of violence and godlessness,” it temporarily appeased even the most ardent territorial revisionists—the expellees eager to return to their Heimat and pronounce it German once again.9 People from all three categories stepped forward from the ranks of West German locals and expellee newcomers. Allegedly, these individuals’ “creative power” (schöpferische Gestaltungskraft) helped craft the prayer wall.10 The ensuing discussion leads up to the question of what exactly was creative about the prayer wall. To pose and then answer this question, let us investigate the beginnings of this structure—two iconoclastic incidents that took place in 1950 and 1951, respectively. Before describing each incident and its lay and clerical reception in West Germany, I will

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fi rst delineate the place of religion, at the time still largely synonymous with Christianity in the West, on the political and cultural map of the Cold War. Then I will outline the two main categories of religious images transported from east to west—imagery that was smuggled out of Czechoslovakia, and imagery that was alleged to have crossed the border without the help of Sudeten German worshippers. Focusing on the latter category, I will then chronicle the events of 1950 and 1951, each involving a figure from a Sudeten German church earmarked for destruction. In this way, we shall learn which attributes of these two objects had the power to shape the icon curtain’s fi rst cornerstones and which possessed little to no traction—that is, which icons were deemed fit for cementing the new chain of sites and which were dismissed. Along the way, “defacement” will serve as a tool of analysis, since “few of the ways an image can be physically ruined are irrelevant to its meaning.”11 Through the prism of iconoclasm, we shall see how the two objects’ divergent physical attributes and border-crossing stories encouraged their disparate aesthetic perceptions that, over time, translated into the strikingly dissimilar trajectories of their cults. The degree of violence inflected upon each figure, their physical location in their respective West German church or chapel, the particularities of their display, and their photographic reproduction and dissemination, became milestones in the complex process of giving the icon curtain its physical shape.

Spiritual Weapons of the “Miracle Years” First, let us recapitulate what put faith onto the forefront of Cold War anticommunism, since Sudeten German activists were not alone in realizing that “one of the most emotive of the major themes of Cold War discourse” presented an unrivaled venue for shaping the periphery into the new confl ict’s center.12 To an extent unprecedented in the twentieth century to that time, the presence or lack of “moral and spiritual meanings” came to defi ne not only participants in the new confrontation and their contemporaries, but also the era itself.13 “Religion” was not only the simple antonym to atheism, it also turned out to be a powerful anesthetic for nuclear fears, as only “divine intervention,” many believed, could avert the ultimate disaster. Of course, religion could not remedy everything, but workable alternatives were even blurrier. Already by the early 1950s, many Westerners had realized that “the construction

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of an entirely new doctrine with which to counter the appeal of communism proved unfeasible.”14 On both sides of the Atlantic, the triedand-true spiritual tradition stepped in as a weapon far superior to innovation. In West Germany, where atomic fears were compounded by the equally frightening lack of food, shelter, and empathy in the wake of World War II, Christianity held the political reigns. With Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Party as the country’s leader, Catholics in particular abandoned their former role as a “defensive minority” and stepped into the limelight to represent “moral integrity and . . . dependable anticommunism.”15 For them, the Cold War was without a doubt, “one of history’s great religious wars.”16 Campaigns waged under the Christian aegis had one clear advantage. Christians already commanded a copious visual vocabulary for exposing “godless Communism,” which had fi rst been used to describe the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and which had now been extended to encompass a Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. The Christian cause also fit in particularly well with the crusading spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s America. In the 1950s, America was responsible for the dissemination, throughout the Western and non-Western world, of countless vignettes to illustrate the godlessness of the Communists. These included Marshall Plan fi lms and, after 1953, cultural materials produced by the United States Information Agency.17 Images of martyrdom were key element in this propaganda. Of course, the use of such imagery predated the Cold War by centuries. Passional narratives have long relied on “fi xed scenarios” and “visual and literary set pieces familiar to the beholder.”18 By the mid-twentieth century, “the shared visual vocabulary of mass-produced religious imagery” continued the work of transforming “Christian beliefs and devotional practices into works of art that impelled new relationships between the viewer and the object.”19 With quite a bit of certainty, stories of the Eastern Bloc assault on Christianity counted on such an overdetermined reception, even if in the early 1950s few knew what shape these religious Passions would take in the new Cold War setting. The photograph with which I opened this chapter is a case in point. The picture’s international idiom—“a slap in the face of all Christians around the world”—allowed Bartl to forgo use of his usual lengthy captions. The instantly recognizable flagrancy of the subject matter permitted him to advance an obscure episode in the long history of the soured Czech–German rapport to a Cold War cause with cross-border appeal.

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At last, he had found a photograph whose regional specificity could cross-dissolve with a vast arsenal of anticommunist phantasms, omnipresent in the West. In this way, the image emphatically recontoured the cultural and religious boundary between Czechs and Germans, creating an even bolder line on the ground that reflected its position at the heart of the new confl ict. Such reinforcement was characteristic also for the incidents described in this chapter. Well before Bartl’s book went to press in 1959, large numbers of Catholics expelled from the Sudeten German areas adjacent to the border considered this line to have been redrawn in the blood of Jesus and their patron saints. Their perception was, for one, figurative. A pencil sketch by the expellee artist Adolf Günther, published in a Protestant newsletter for Germans from Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in 1965, proposed just such a vision of religion’s flesh scored not merely in the East, but by the East-West divide itself (fig. 10). In the drawing, Günther’s Jesus, slumping down the eastern side of the barrier (complete with a dilapidated house and a watchtower in the background) and illuminated by a white cross of light, sheds blood on the derelict borderland. 20 Every detail of the setting—the blades of glass, the logs bristling with thorns, the barbed wire—is poised to wound. Jesus’s arms, stretched out crosswise and unnaturally stiff, prepare the rest of his limp body for a new Passion, be it religion’s suppression in the East or its feared decline in the West. Still, despite its seemingly clear message, the image incites a confusing gamut of feelings. On the one hand, it is expected to embolden the newsletter’s readers to fight off the perils of atheism. On the other hand, it is unclear how exactly this can be accomplished: the barbed wire prevents the audience from receiving or embracing Christ’s body, and his vacuous stare does not meet the eye of the beholder. Uniformed figures at the top of the image—Czechoslovak border patrols shielding their faces, or, alternatively, distressed German POWs—avert their gaze and exacerbate the sense of helplessness and detachment. Extended on both diagonals between the two groups, Pontius Pilate, endowed with unmistakably Semitic features, washes his hands in an ultimate renunciation of agency. What is the beholder to do? Along the actual border, the answer to this question was less difficult to come by. There, the purported abuse of religion in the East was more than a metaphor, and it vested ordinary believers with an unexpected “spiritual influence.”21 Vignettes of violence, witnessed or invented, did not merely “diffus[e] into a transcendent drama of . . . suffering.”

figure 10. Adolf Günther, Untitled, 1963. From Glaube und Heimat 13, no. 7 (July 1965): n.p. Courtesy of Johannes-Mathesius-Gesellschaft.

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Tied to the ongoing confl ict and the “needs, fantasies, desires, and fears of that moment,” they embedded suffering in a historically and geographically specific context. 22 In contrast to depictions of Christ’s figurative modern-day Passions, such as Günther’s, physical attacks against Sudeten German religious imagery behind the Iron Curtain allowed both expellees and locals to recover their shaken sense of agency, as these people rescued, groomed, and promoted their fi nds to buttress the borderland’s Christian ethos. Like Günther’s Jesus, some salvaged religious images were literally hung on the Iron Curtain itself. Yet, unlike the drawn Christ, they did not thus hang in perpetuity, but made their way into West Germany instead. Expellees and natives not only retold the circumstances of the statues’ arrivals; frequently they intervened on the figures’ behalf. The ousted icons’ reception on Bavaria’s eastern rim modeled just how the people grasped the transformation of the divide between Czechs and Germans as a fracture between the blocs. And because by 1953 the population of Sudeten German Catholics in the Federal Republic had reached the impressive mark of 1,745,000—more than 50 percent of the overall constituency—the willing recipients of this iconography regularly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. 23 These believers neither confi ned themselves to the churches and chapels around their new West German residences nor, as we might be tempted to assume from Bartl’s book, did they single-mindedly obsess about the decline of religious structures back home. Pessimism would have weakened Christianity’s central message—a message for which the landscape of the Iron Curtain turned out to be an ideal surface for projection. While “tragedy, disruption, death . . . are key elements in the development of pilgrimage sites and cultures,” for thousands of Sudeten Germans they were a means rather than an end. 24 Religions, as Thomas A. Tweed reminds us, “do more than point to suffering. They offer solutions to enhance joy.” 25 And the sentiments simmering along the Iron Curtain’s western side would have lost their potency had they centered exclusively on the charcoal piles upon which countless carved and sculpted Jesuses, Madonnas, and saints had found their end. While such depictions of doomed sainthood as Bartl’s photograph were plentiful, stories of resilience and hope remained the most powerful “spiritual weapons” (invoking Eisenhower’s words) of the confl ict’s civilian participants. Even as Sudeten German believers eagerly exposed and condemned Soviet-style iconoclasm, often observable from the border, their faith

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thrived on tales of images that defied the onslaught of flames and axes. Like their other Continental neighbors plagued by “post-war stress, political confl ict, socio-economic crisis,” they longed for divine signs. 26 Indeed, the Cold War’s fi rst decade found large parts of Western Europe, and to an extent Eastern Europe, “deluged with . . . wonders” and their residents in thrall to the “miracle dependency,” a term coined by the Spanish Jesuit Carlos María Staehlin in 1954. 27 Fluctuations in religious sentiment, ranging from zeal to despair, did not result from fears of the nuclear peril alone; they reflected multiple economic and ideological shifts and geopolitical changes, and among these the descent of the Iron Curtain loomed large. The unexplored resurgence of religion along the divide indicates that the link between faith revivals and “political persecution, material distress, and social change,” as the historian David Blackbourn put it, was not restricted to well-known apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Any religious event that approximated a miracle and left behind tangible evidence had special cachet.28 And what could be more tangible than Jesus’s wooden body tormented at the Iron Curtain by a frustrated Czech border guard? The new hosts of just such rumps went to great pains to translate religion’s defeat in the East into its triumph in the West, converting the statues’ scratches and missing limbs into spiritual and political gains. Accounts of such incidents documented the rise of the Cold War barrier as much as they helped produce its fictions and “inven[t] a new sense of place.”29 As the fortifications grew denser, so did the shrines that served as the building blocks of the prayer wall. There was, in fact, a symbiotic relationship between the early narratives of the divide and the outcast sculptures and paintings from the East. If religious imagery indeed participates in “the social constitution of reality,” there was relatively little that Sudeten German cultic objects would have contributed to the unfolding actuality of the Cold War barrier had they remained in their original, unharmed state. 30 Their status as testimonial pieces with a vast aesthetic capital accrued to them thanks to their defacement at the Iron Curtain. Catholic images from the Sudetenland thus propelled popular civilian narratives about the Cold War divide. The latter, in turn, enabled these objects’ new trajectory. Why did Sudeten Germans hold on to the new legends and use their occasionally embellished versions to shape new borderland cults? Allocating new places to traditional piety, as the earliest expellee ethnographers already observed, facilitated the newcomers’ integration into West

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German society by identifying common Christian roots and preventing the uprooted individuals’ undesirable drift toward the political left or right. 31 Those en route to integration, however, frequently faced a choice between two confl icting alternatives: unorthodoxy or clerical approval. Without having to adopt one and reject the other, Sudeten Germans staggered their options. On the one hand, they capitalized on the “existential dissonances” of the 1950s, when rationality jousted with superstition, the haves with the have-nots, institutions with individual outliers, and Catholic Church officials with “powerless churchgoers” whom Sudeten Germans now joined in the push for greater influence. 32 On the other hand, these expellees exploited their edge over the native renegades. In contrast to the embattled Marian apparitions that swept through West Germany, France, and Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the borderland incidents left behind the requisite entourage of material evidence. At times, the proof was impressive enough to win over the clerical powers-that-be, fi rst on the local and later at the diocesan level—no easy task for outsiders who all too frequently met with rejection. The path to the icon curtain was paved with juggling the said alternatives.

Miracles along the Iron Curtain: The Eastern Bloc Statues Arrive Discovered in the early 1950s, the battered statues from the demolished Sudeten German churches had limited capacity to reach out to their worshippers off the pages of periodicals or local chronicles. To provide physical proof of faith’s obstinate endurance at the Iron Curtain and thereby foreground the relevance of the Cold War border for Christians the world over, these likenesses, believers were certain, had to become physically accessible on new altars and chapel walls in the Federal Republic. The journeys of the assaulted images to West German sanctuaries became the stuff of new legends that offered a powerful commentary on the adaptation of religious practice to Cold War realities. Of course, not all new objects of popular piety installed at the Iron Curtain differed from their century-old counterparts. Many appeared unchanged, arriving in West Germany straight from their worshippers’ communal and personal pasts in Czechoslovakia’s borderlands. Between the late 1940s and the early 1980s, Sudeten Germans smuggled an array of rustic-looking religious images—mainly sculptures or paintings of

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Jesus or of Mary, several of the latter dubbed “Madonnas at the Iron Curtain” or “border Madonnas.” They arrived tucked away in suitcases and in car luggage compartments; a few benefited from their rescuers’ diplomatic connections. Their lay guardian angels lovingly restored any chipped corners and fi lled cracks in the paint to preserve the original appearance of their trophies, much like exiles from another Cold War epicenter—Cuba—would do a decade later. 33 There were too many examples to catalogue. A robust Madonna from Bohemian Neumugl/Nové Mohelno found a new home right across the border at Kappl near Ottengrün, where she could keep a watchful eye on the Communist doings across the divide. One academically trained expellee sculptor repaired a statue of St. Ernestine from Kuttenplan/Chodová Planá, one of whose arms had gone missing in transit. 34 One nineteenth-century image of a “Madonna with a Rose” waited until the 1980s to gain her safe passage; eventually she was successfully transplanted from Böhmisch-Röhren/ Cˇeské Žleby to West German Philippsreut. 35 Yet loving care was not desirable in every case; just as often, the reverse was true. Cold War believers reveled in some figures’ hard-earned scars nearly as much as they had once taken pride in the statues’ fi ne execution or resplendent gold coating. The road to embracing such defects was anything but straightforward, and it did not happen overnight. Codependent reconfigurations of space, on the one hand, and ritual, on the other, were both bound up in the fate of the religious images—the most ceremoniously welcomed escapees from the Sudetenland. The result, however, was well worth the time it took, since these linkages afforded the figures special weight. No longer ordinary sculptures, they now became legendary, since, as rumor had it, some of them had eschewed the hands of well-meaning Sudeten German smugglers and had crossed the Iron Curtain by themselves. Hailed as miraculous, their arrivals set in motion several simultaneous processes whose scope transcended the use of religion as an abstract ideological “too[l] with which to fight the ‘good fight,’ for God and country.”36 One was to chronicle the early years of construction of the military barrier, a topic about which image worshippers rarely failed to report. The second was to co-constitute the landscape of the border and shape its imagery on civilian terms. The third was to connect the past of the Bohemian Forest in the East—an area defi ned by its chapels no less than its trees— with the present evolving political, cultural, and economic significance of the Bavarian Forest in the West.

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The cults inaugurated by the arrival of these images configured the Iron Curtain as a latter-day instrument of the ongoing Passion, in line with the long-standing custom of adopting “traditional uses of the Passion story to novel effect.”37 Sudeten German legends from the 1950s and 1960s saw to the barrier’s imaginative transformation from a sequence of red-and-white-painted turnpikes and makeshift barricades into the modern counterpart of the crown of thorns. In the minds of expellees, the Iron Curtain was not a metaphorical “bleeding border,” a wound trope characteristic of the nationalistic Weimar-era pilgrimages to the Silesian borderlands. 38 It was a site where actual wood-and-gesso Jesus and Madonna statues were abused—only to survive, much to their assaulters’ chagrin, and rise to new heights. Sudeten German visitations of these survivors did not merely resemble pilgrimages: they were pilgrimages. The fence thus became inscribed in the broadened conventions of Christian iconography long before the end of the Cold War, when easterners, in Daphne Berdahl’s account of the Seventh Station of the Cross in the Eichsfeld region, used barbed wire to replace the lost pieces of the sanctuaries to be restored. 39 Drawing on stock borderland narratives, accounts of the statues’ tribulations summoned unlikely bedfellows—Czech and Bavarian border police, clergy, West German natives, and Sudeten German expellees. Not only did they bring together different worlds—local and regional, national and international—to form a juncture already central to Blackbourn’s seminal study of piety in the Wilhelmine era, they also troubled the scope and meaning of localism on the demographically redefi ned Cold War periphery. Their implicit question—who and what was local— pertained not only to Germany and its postwar fi xation on belonging, but to the changing geographies of Central Europe at large. Were the borderlands local microcosms, national peripheries, or the international centers of a new confl ict? Could they be all of the above? Who and what would be assimilable into their recharted contours? Who would make such decisions and what resonance would they have? These are the questions that set the tone for the discussion below. In contrast to postwar Marian apparitions, alleged to have found scant reflection in secular sources, the tales of the Sudeten German images ousted from the Eastern Bloc resonated widely in writings and publications aimed at both locals and expellee newcomers, both clerics and laity.40 The backdrop of the Iron Curtain provided these encounters with an unambiguous time stamp and lent them a new level of intensity. At-

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tempts to homogenize and codify their stories in the mid-1960s reflected the well-known dynamic of medieval Passional narratives: they replaced the initially ambivalent or relatively nuanced characters of Czechoslovak soldiers, Bavarian border patrol officers, and Sudeten German newcomers with archetypes of good and evil fit for the iconographic canon. To accent the poignancy of this old-new Iron Curtain imagery, the keepers of these miracle accounts, typically parish priests or curates, drew attention to the border as the point where the despondent streak of Cold War realities and imaginings intersected with the Christian promise of redemption. More than twenty years after the barrier’s dismantling, these images, still attached to church walls in rural Bavaria, attest to the fusion between Cold War rifts, real and imagined, and the century-old conventions of depicting Christian suffering.

The “Expelled” Virgin Of course, the maltreated statues were few, as it was precisely their rarity that conferred upon them special powers. Keen observers of the Czechoslovak–Bavarian borderland, the Sudeten Germans focused their attention on two prominent cases from the early 1950s—years that overlapped, not coincidentally, with the formative phase in the construction of the Iron Curtain. These were among the earliest incidents to resonate with readers of the expellee press and ethnographers, such as Karasek-Langer, eager to popularize the expellee cause in academic circles. They were also among the fi rst events that brought thousands of Sudeten German expellees to the border just as it was being transformed into a fence. One such event took place in Mitterfi rmiansreut in the Upper Palatinate, and another around Waldsassen in Franconia, across the border from Marienbad, the run-down resort paradise. Although the two incidents were separated in time by only months and in distance by some hundred and twenty miles, they could not have had more disparate histories. The differences between them stemmed from the images around which the resulting cults would evolve. The power of these likenesses, or lack thereof, derived not from their efficacy or their ability to respond to the worshippers’ entreaties,41 but from their “experiences” at the border. The circumstances of their transit from East to West conditioned their future careers, cultic and aesthetic.

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Despite the lack of any obvious special powers inherent in the images, both initially registered with the people “as supernatural or at least unusual.”42 But why exactly? Uneasy about the lack of the usual evidence, such as apparitions or healings, for years the clerics in charge of the cults’ fates struggled to outline the statues’ relationship to the miraculous. They established, rather gratuitously, that miraculousness amounted to the statues’ capacity both to embody division and to weather the menace of fragmentation. The fact of the artifacts’ survival was insufficient in itself. Only the circumstances of their survival—the more trying, the better—dictated the success or failure of the respective cults. These circumstances turned both incidents into testing grounds for the limits of Christian mythopoiesis in the Cold War borderlands. They probed the point at which the new era’s icon-making shattered. As we shall see, the narratives that harnessed the supernatural were ultimately used to dismiss the cult at Mitterfi rmiansreut and to legitimate the one in Waldsassen. Indeed, Mitterfi rmiansreut fell into oblivion following an intense but short-lived heyday between 1950 and 1955. After that, the cult all but disappeared, leaving behind an endearingly clunky piece of folk art on the wall of a minuscule chapel in an “extremely remote and difficult to reach” ski village.”43 The sculpture in Waldsassen, in contrast, retained a considerable following throughout the Cold War, received a papal benediction in 1962, endured long enough to see its new West German home rise to the status of a Basilica minor, and made it into the German edition of the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano in October 1997. Over the decades, pocket-size prayer leaflets commissioned by local clerics and distributed inside the basilica traded the grainy black-and-white prints of an armless torso in a wooden frame for expressive close-ups of a richly flesh-toned, blood-streaked body against a dramatic gray background. These changes elevated a seemingly unremarkable polychrome sculpture to a work of Christian art supposedly on a par with other world-class treasures that the basilica and the adjacent nunnery had to offer. The contrasting trajectories of the two locations speak to the pressures felt both by West German locals and by expellee newcomers to incorporate the still idyllic-looking border into the emerging narratives of Cold War tragic realism—the period’s aesthetic born out of the need to assimilate rupture. Yet, they also attest to the difficulties of making such a leap. Let us take a closer look at both cults to consider how the prominence of the Iron Curtain in their narratives determined their success or

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failure. An important locus of modern-day iconoclasm, the barrier conditioned the endurance of the two images, either facilitating or obstructing their passage into the aesthetic realm. Let us start with the earliest episode. Mitterfi rmiansreut, a hamlet just to the west of the border, where “the Bavarian Forest shows its tallest and most rugged side, in fact, still on the ridge of the Bohemian Forest,” could easily go down in history as the site of the fi rst Iron Curtain miracle and thus the cradle of the icon curtain.44 The locale was among the fi rst hinges not only between prewar and postwar lives of ritual objects in the borderlands but also between the cultural and religious landscapes to the east and west of the descending Cold War barrier. Yet the exact course of events that put a place so small on the cultural and political map is remarkably difficult to reconstitute. The records of what happened in its environs in late May 1950 appear suspended between utter deferral and active deployment of human agency, typical for many miracle accounts. Be that as it may, most reports concurr that Franz Rosenauer, an expellee from Unterlichtbuchet/ Dolní Sveˇtlé Hory in the Bohemian Forest, discovered a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary lying at the border between East and West on May 22 of that year.45 It took him a split second to recognize that the image of the Madonna and Child, amply adorned with gilded rays, had come from a chapel in his former home village (fig. 11). Yet, Rosenauer had not witnessed the Virgin’s arrival, and so nobody knew how exactly the statue had “crossed” into the West. Thus, a later speculation suggested that “possibly religious Czech soldiers” had “brought her across the border and laid her in the grass there, since the Madonna herself had no place [in Czechoslovakia] after the entire German population was chased away.”46 It was entirely feasible, it was suggested in an oral report submitted by Rosenauer’s family to Schroubek, that the soldiers’ intentions were friendly and aimed at protecting rather than desecrating the image. Indeed, as Mitterfi rmiansreut’s Catholic curate (Expositor) Franz Grillinger mused, “Carrying (das Herübertragen) costs effort”; although he was still hesitant about the ability of “dependable young communists” to perform such an act of mercy.47 If anything, on the eve of the border’s militarization, the contemporary press painted a relatively benevolent picture of the Czechs: “In those days Czechs, who were destroying roadside shrines and churches all over the frontier area, removed the Madonna statue from [the Unterlichtbuchet] chapel as well. Yet they brought the figure to a German house next to the border

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figure 11. The “expelled Madonna,” Mitterfi rmiansreut chapel. Photo by the author.

and laid it in such a way that it could not have been overlooked by the residents.”48 The interest in the details of the Virgin’s transport, Schroubek observed, did not conform to its relatively unremarkable logistics. Legends proliferated, mingling into a dissonant cacophony that would eventually

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seal the cult’s fate. According to some, the Madonna arrived by herself carrying the cross. Others reported that when the statue was found, it had stood at the border and bowed. Alternatively, it had “emigrated” and was discovered by local children who followed a heavenly voice into the bushes. It shone brightly in the light to draw attention to itself, or pangs of conscious had forced a Czech to deliver it across the border. These disparate anecdotes lacked consistency, and the absence of a witness did not enhance the Virgin’s credibility as having arrived via a miracle. Before the clerics intervened, however, there was nothing to foretell this Mary’s future obsolescence. Initially, the Rosenauers and their expellee housemates were tempted to keep the statue at home, and they apparently did so for some time.49 Yet, the story of her arrival circulated among the locals and expellees with lightning speed. The overwhelming “interest and excitement” around the unexpected guest quickly translated into small-scale, mostly individual pilgrimages. And rumors, no matter how unreliable, continued to be the most powerful medium of cross-border communication until the barrier was consolidated in 1952. 50 They easily caught on with the locals, who became the fi rst recruits for the still unofficial cult. This was hardly surprising, since in the 1950s Mitterfi rmiansreut counted 356 Catholic inhabitants (and only two nonCatholics), 25 percent of them expellees. 51 To regulate the flow of visitors, Grillinger suggested installing the Madonna in the village chapel. And indeed, this is where visitors could soon fi nd her, accompanied by a small note that explained that “on May 22 of the Holy year 1950 this venerable Madonna, which stood in the Unterlichtbuchet Chapel for as long as one can remember, was found lain across the border and thus also expelled, just as her pious worshippers.” The parallel to the expelled newcomers was an important element in the cult’s emergence, and the Madonna was regularly described as having been shown the door of her own church. And yet, as obvious as the connection between the figure’s old and new lives appears to have been, the decision to host the Virgin cost Grillinger some sleepless nights. More than anything, by his own admission, he worked hard to avert the kind of unbridled gallop of events that had swept up Upper Franconian Heroldsbach, about eighty miles away from the border with Czechoslovakia, in October 1949. There, recurrent apparitions to groups of children and adults produced a Virgin cult that spilled well beyond the diocesan boundaries and teetered on the brink of mass hysteria for years. 52 Because Marian devotion took over postwar

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Europe, examples from other locales, particularly those not doctrinally appropriate, were constantly on the minds of clerics such as Grillinger. The waves of rapture (Begeisterung) among Mitterfi rmiansreut’s visitors that he described in his communications with Karasek-Langer inspired the curate as much as they frightened him. He especially dreaded the fact that neither rapture nor legends had delimited local provenance. They could not be easily contained, as they “always kept coming from the outside.”53 Rumors, it seemed, took possession of the devotees, and the latter offered little resistance. “The legend formation,” in KarasekLanger’s apt observation, “usurped the unusual fi nd” that the Madonna undoubtedly was. 54 Not surprisingly, the thought that the borderlands as a space of contagion—all the more chaotic given the mounting Cold War tensions—could hold sway over religious practices and sacred ground, terrified Grillinger. 55 From its fi rst days, the barrier’s unstable environment and the tide of Marian devotion across Europe threatened to become a liability rather than an advantage for the fledgling cult. If the Catholic Church saw itself as being under attack, nowhere did it feel more vulnerable than along the West’s edges. To discipline the expressions of rapture, to lend them a sense of historical context and causality, Grillinger invested in epithets that, from then on, characterized the Virgin’s worship in the sleepy backwoods. In the face of divergent and unpredictable responses from pilgrims, he signed up to do what clerics had often done in the past: restrain believers. 56 This entailed supporting the cult while keeping a tight rein on the terms of worship. Already by mid-July 1950, Grillinger had approved of the pilgrimage to the “expelled” (ausgewiesene), “resettled” (ausgesiedelte), “migrant” (ausgewanderte), or “castaway” (ausgestoßene) Madonna. The descriptive labels were, indeed, several. Yet they were anything but contradictory or baffl ing. Rather, they offered Grillinger and his successors a coordinated system, a blueprint for organizing the cult in uncertain times. These words aligned in a relatively orderly counterweight to the difficult-to-control rapturous impulse, even if the terms hinged on one particular paradox. For, although the anecdotes suggest that the one-time Unterlichtbucheters and locals alike believed that the Czechs had had no intention of desecrating the abandoned figure, when describing the occasion, both Grillinger and his congregants resorted to participles with rather violent connotations. The fourfold reiteration of “out” (aus) performed two diametrically opposed functions. On the one hand, aus coded the borderlands as a tumultuous, violent site on the

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cusp between two confl icts—a designation seemingly justified by actual events and fictive imaginings in equal measure. On the other hand, the repetition of aus also served to contain this violence and set limits to uncontrolled rapture. The participles’ grammatical homogeneity and the refrain of diphthongs at the beginning of each word assuaged the worshippers’ zeal. Grillinger’s four-word vocabulary of religious practice in the Cold War borderlands was intended to appeal to the postwar experience of displacement among the expellees no less than locals. At least in part, the believers’ enthusiasm for the new cult derived from their interpretations of the Madonna’s advent to the village tucked away in the hills. The statue’s misfortune, in their eyes, mirrored that of postwar Germans, many of them homeless, disoriented, or even simply fearful of the large numbers of newcomers whom they viewed as intruders. Each group, in the end, “tailor[ed] the image to [its own] experience.”57 The focus on the figure’s privations was supposed to boost the popularity of St. Mary, already the most-revered patron saint of expellees and locals alike. Yet the row of four participles with a violent tinge offered but a modest compensation for the blurry legends around the Virgin’s uneventful arrival in rural Bavaria. In the long run, as further evidence suggests, even this compensation did not suffice to keep the cult alive. The legends’ ambiguities undercut the tragic thrust that could have otherwise helped plug long-standing Christian iconographies into the Cold War present. At the beginning, however, pilgrims voted with their feet for the success of Grillinger’s nomenclature. Given the scarcity of widely distributed periodicals for religious expellees (until 1951, only the Catholic Glaube und Heimat and the ecumenical Christ unterwegs were in print), personal correspondence and hearsay carried the news of the disenfranchised Madonna. An astounding twelve to fi fteen hundred pilgrims— many more than could fit within the tiny chapel—showed up on 16 July 1950, the fi rst important Marian holiday of the year (Our Lady of Mount Carmel). This number also constituted many more people than the village would usually host. Moreover, between one hundred fi fty and two hundred additional pilgrims would arrive on most subsequent Sundays well through October 1950—a trend that held roughly until Grillinger left his post in late 1951—necessitating the chapel’s urgent renovation. But even once it was remodeled, the chapel was still too small to accommodate everyone, although most visits fell on only one church holiday in the entire year. Although the numbers of attendees could hardly

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compete with the fi fty thousand guests that were occasionally counted in Heroldsbach, they nevertheless inaugurated massive changes in the patterns of visitor traffic in the borderlands. Grillinger dared to suggest that the numbers even surpassed the flood of worshippers in Altötting, one of Bavaria’s oldest and most beloved pilgrimage sites. As a result, during the fi rst summer of the cult’s existence and over several summers to follow, the expanding popularity of the image mandated that the curate make routine applications for field Mass permits with the Bishopric of Passau. Making their way home from the fi rst pilgrimage in July 1950, worshippers left Grillinger with assurances of their continued interest in returning in the foreseeable future. 58 And, indeed, throughout 1951 and 1952, the curates’ letters to the diocese anticipated “massive droves” in mid-July. The influx appeared so steady that one such letter announced a new tradition, describing the pilgrimage as “customary” already in the third year of its existence. 59 Nevertheless, the correspondence between the bishopric and local clerics documents just how fragile such newly forged customs were, even when they reached back to the long-standing links between the Bohemian Forest and the woods in Bavaria’s east. As soon as Grillinger left his post in late 1951, diocesan dignitaries in Passau spared few words to express their concern about the goings-on in the immediate vicinity of the border. The cult’s geographical circumstances exacerbated the skepticism that West German clerical authorities professed vis-à-vis yet another figuration of the Virgin and “expellee customs” (Flüchtlingsbräuche) in general: between 1947 and 1954 they had investigated more than eleven new Marian apparition sites, three times as many as ever before.60 In regard to “expellee customs,” it did not help that ethnic German newcomers had recently fallen into nationwide disrepute as half-pagan quacks who, like the popular healer Bruno Gröning, cast a net of superstition, heresy, and malpractice over their unsuspecting countrymen.61 In this atmosphere, high-ranking clergy eyed the “expelled Madonna” with suspicion. Unlike BBP or local town administrators elsewhere, church officials showed little interest in the impact that the new pilgrimage might have on bolstering the region’s infrastructure and bringing in additional revenue. Already in his answer to Grillinger’s interim successor Franz Pröbstle, dated 14 July 1952, General Vicar Franz Riemer disapprovingly noted that “strict care ought to be taken to ensure unconditional calm and dignified course of the service.”62 Allusions to a lack of poise referred to the

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celebrations in July 1951, which had apparently been swathed in wafts of rowdy country-fair flair and spiced with “music, shooting galleries, swing, dance,” to crown what was, perhaps not coincidentally, the most successful year for Mitterfi rmiansreut’s new Virgin. Pröbstle, who considered the pilgrimage a burden in the fi rst place, quickly piggybacked on the worries of his superiors about the crowds flocking to the extremities of the Western Bloc. In July 1952 he promised diocesan authorities in Passau that the service that year would appear “dignified to the outside as well.” This, in his eyes, would necessarily have to exclude the ruckus of traditional brass music and other revels that had “made themselves disagreeably noticeable last year.”63 Ultimately, Mitterfi rmiansreut’s proximity to the border did less to affi rm the authority of Mary’s expelled figure than it placed an unanticipated onus on those involved in maintaining the site. The figure’s stature quickly withered in the midst of doctrinal apprehensions, clerical as much as political. In the light of Pröbstle’s notes, it seemed only auspicious that in the summer of 1952 the pilgrimage would confl ict with a large gathering of former Bohemian Forest residents on Dreisessel, a south Bavarian landmark that I shall explore in chapter 3. This coincidence supposedly dispelled the disquietingly carnivalesque spirit of the previous year’s gatherings by luring entertainers away into the even thicker woods of the Cold War periphery. Clerics on site and in Passau needed to worry less about indecorous or excessive merriment. In contrast to what one might expect, however, this did little to sharpen their focus on nurturing the site’s cachet in order to “confront the [area’s] cultural vacuum,” a term on the lips of administrators fearful of waning religious practice and enthusiasm for traditions in one of West Germany’s most stagnant areas.64 On the contrary, the confl ict offered Pröbstle and his colleagues in Passau a welcome relief from the visitor hordes and a convenient excuse to shut down the cult. As it turns out, Pröbstle, whether by choice or by accident, neglected to advertise and prepare for the pilgrimage in July 1953, when the villagers were in the midst of searching for a permanent curate to fi ll Grillinger’s post. Consequently, even the timeliest rallying call for pilgrims, publicized in the expellee press as well as the largest regional paper, Passauer Neue Presse, yielded hardly more than a hundred visitors in July 1954. This was, beyond a doubt, a dramatic, more than tenfold drop in the number of pilgrims, compared to 1950. Worse, it had the misfortune of occurring during the “Marian year,” proclaimed by the

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Vatican to mark the hundred-year anniversary of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Without beating about the bush, Father Künzel, Grillinger’s long-term replacement now in the second year of his tenure, sat down to ponder the reasons for this lapse. His musings took up but a short paragraph in his letter to the diocesan authorities, a missive that doubled as the cult’s death sentence. Were there, perhaps, too many competing events, secular and religious, he asked? Did the diocese have more than enough established pilgrimage sites? Did the available choices overwhelm believers, as Karasek-Langer had once foreseen?65 Such questions were rhetorical, and Künzel’s letter spelled a positive answer, implicit or explicit, to each one of them. To save his correspondents the trouble of deliberating, the cleric put together a carefully worded yet assertive rationale for discontinuing the pilgrimage. Already in May 1955, he declared it “inopportune.” Writing in the requisite third person singular, he stated his own “lack of interest in its maintenance for the following reasons: An otherwise unknown figure of the Virgin Mary, in his opinion, does not justify founding a new pilgrimage site, especially since no special signs occurred either during [the figure’s] discovery or otherwise up until now.” The pilgrimage, he continued, brought about neither a “notable pastoral success [nor] a boost in religious life,” and the diocesan authorities would do well to advise the local community that the site’s continued upkeep was “neither necessary nor desirable.” In Passau, Riemer responded within a record two days, sparing no words in support of Künzel’s intentions. The pilgrimage, Riemer wrote, simply did not have what it takes to fi nd “lasting resonance either with the historical circumstances or among the Christian folks.” Its caretakers should, therefore, “not only not encourage it, but let it sink into oblivion” altogether, rerouting believers to the already established Marian sites in the area.66 If a cult of an image discovered right at the emerging Cold War border was out of synch with “historical events,” what could have been timelier? What did it take to secure the enduring appeal to “the Christian folks”? What were the “requirements,” as Riemer put it, for such a success? Admittedly, Künzel was right: Bavarian sites of worship were hardly in short supply, and expellees quite possibly experienced a surfeit of concurrent secular and religious offerings. Yet, ultimately, the decision was not forced from the bottom up, as these reasons would lead one to expect. The choice to discourage the Virgin’s worship was the clerics’ own, even if the laity offered no documented resistance. To be

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sure, the high concentration of congregants in such close proximity to the border must have been a nuisance. Yet, elsewhere, such nuisances were routinely handed over to the BBP so that clerics could attend to loftier matters. The logistics of accommodating large numbers of people for just a few days may have indeed been an unpleasant hassle, albeit at this time numerous borderland communities greeted visitors with open arms since revenues from traditional industries, especially porcelainand glassmaking, were plunging in the 1950s and 1960s.67 Paternalistic concerns about attendance at better-known pilgrimage sites could have certainly had some validity, yet the bulk of attendees at Mitterfi rmiansreut were expellee newcomers with no or few allegiances to local sites other than Lower Bavarian Altötting or Upper Palatine Neukirchen beim Heilig Blut. Possibly, fears that expellee gatherings could breed political radicalism caused Künzel and his peers to have second thoughts, although their correspondence suggests that control over radical merrymaking occupied their minds much more than countervailing the specters of Communism or Fascism. There was thus another significant, if less obvious, factor that played into the Church’s decision to give up on Mitterfi rmiansreut. The same reason may also explain the pilgrims’ astonishing readiness to accept the Church’s verdict. It had to do less with the political timeliness of this particular Virgin’s worship and a lot more with time as a determinant of the value that accrues to artifacts. “Art,” noted Emile Durkheim in his seminal study, “is not merely an external ornament with which the cult has adorned itself in order to dissimulate certain of its features which may be too austere and too rude; but rather, in itself, the cult is something aesthetic.”68 The question was whether the little figure at Mitterfi rmiansreut was capable of rallying believers around just such a cult. In the clerics’ opinion, Mitterfi rmiansreut’s Madonna lacked precisely the aesthetic thrust that, in due course, could transfer from the image onto the devotion itself. The figure’s aura failed to spellbind its ritual surroundings. This was not only on account of the irksome clanking brass band noise that accompanied its worship. Künzel’s statement that Mitterfi rmiansreut’s new Madonna was an “unknown figure” was rife with ambiguity. It implied, simultaneously, its utterly inconsequential place in the landscape of Christian piety prior to 1950, its past and present obscurity as an artifact, as well as its disappointingly quiet entrance into Mitterfi rmiansreut, where it neither worked miracles nor arrived accompanied by an appropriately suspenseful border-crossing story.

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The violent epithets that described it suggested iconoclastic acts, yet these turned out to be but a projection. The statue’s purported deficits were so many that the contradictions between them drove the figure’s reception into a blind alley. It was simultaneously caught between the suspicion of having imported excessive rapturous drama into the already unstable borderlands and of not projecting enough of it. Unmarred by reports of witnessed violence—in Grillinger’s words, the figure “weathered the resettlement well”69—the Virgin’s taintless survival, in the eyes of the clerics, anticipated its failure as a grace-giving image. It did not deliver on the demands of Cold War tragic realism. In fact, the figure’s mirthful appearance, unchanged by its relocation across the border, failed to hit the tragic pitch altogether. In the absence of chipped paint, let alone broken limbs, its cheerful glow was dubious fodder for concerted mythmaking. Unlike Madonna figures elsewhere, it did not bleed or cry. As the clerics saw it, it did not do anything at all. It was unclear what role the evolving Cold War fortification had to play in the narratives of the Madonna’s rescue, other than simply appear as the place of its discovery. In the era of the Virgin Mary’s greatest successes on the Continent, Mary’s incarnation at Mitterfi rmiansreut could not ride the wave of such prestige. The evidentiary vacuum around the figure’s arrival in Bavaria left almost too much freedom to the imagination, yet too little common ground for a shared core of events around which further storytelling could be spun. The Virgin’s display reflected this conundrum: there was, in the end, only minimal décor, and nothing other than a brief note marked the figure’s special status. When David Freedberg, in his influential study of religious art, asked whether such exteriorities mattered, the answer was only partially in the affi rmative. Although the relationship between “looks and efficacy” is highly volatile, Freedberg wrote, occasionally believers “may be so impressed by how the image looks that they are fi lled with a strengthened belief in what it can achieve.” 70 At Mitterfi rmiansreut, the Madonna’s unremarkable and even derivative visual appearance, coupled with the figure’s scant pre-1945 familiarity and insufficient post-1945 notoriety, did not make for a winning combination. Years after the cult fell into the oblivion so desired by Riemer, an article in Passau’s central paper unpacked the statue’s spurious aesthetic appeal. The article’s anonymous author observed that the Virgin was “one of those somewhat cloddish Bohemian Madonnas as one could encounter them all over the place there.” Albeit likely made in a “famous wood-

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carving workshop,” it was one of the many copies of the famous Prˇíbram Madonna, a mere hundred years old at that.71 It was, on the one hand, a type far too local and uncommon to have cross-border appeal. And on the other hand, its significant flaw was its utterly common, unremarkable appearance that even its gilded-ray halo could not alter. The figure installed in the Mitterfi rmiansreut chapel was neither a beautiful corpse lacerated by the onset of Cold War division, nor was it, simply put, beautiful. And yet, even such deficits were formative: with the statue’s discovery, aesthetic considerations began to take hold in the Cold War borderlands.

The “Mutilated” Christ Several months later, the main shortcoming of Mitterfi rmiansreut’s Madonna—its purported inability to inspire a coherent legend—was redressed on the northern edges of the Bavarian forest. On 8 February 1951, the head of the BBP station in Waldsassen, High Commissioner Dietl, forwarded an incident report not only to the habitual address of his superiors in Munich but also to the parish priest as well as the diocesan authorities in Regensburg. Unusual as this may have seemed, the officer’s actions were justified by the nature of the extraordinary event he described. According to Dietl, two days earlier, a border policeman patrolling the area across from Wies, a newly razed Czech village about three quarters of a mile from Bavarian Hundsbach and three miles away from Waldsassen, observed the following: Three Czechs, “supposedly cadres of the border police (SNB),” had secured a Christ figure to a newly set up roadblock. “The manner of its attachment,” Dietl declared, “clearly showed [their] sacrilegious intent.” The mise-en-scène was no doubt deliberate: a rope noose tied Jesus’s neck to one of the construction’s bars and thus propped his body in an upright position. To avoid “such and possibly worse . . . treatment,” the officer had waited for an opportune moment, seized the figure, and delivered it to his BBP superiors in Waldsassen. “One can assume,” Dietl added, “that the . . . figure comes from the pilgrimage Church in Wies . . . , once a protected historic monument” that had been demolished in the fall of 1950. This brief outline served also as the statue’s introduction to the abbey church in Waldsassen, a landmark already famous for its ornate interior and its link to

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the architecturally important adjacent nunnery, another hallmark of the Franconian Baroque. The note entrusted the care of the image, supposedly “unclaimed as yet,” to the parish priest and asked him to inform the locals, by and large already familiar with the occurrence, in order “to counter potential misrepresentations (Entstellungen) of facts.” 72 Just as Dietl suspected, the reception of the event had started out with rumors. As on comparable occasions elsewhere, the making of a new cult was a collective process not always easily controlled.73 Yet the rapid-fi re spread of hearsay was one of the few similarities between the incident in Waldsassen and what had taken place in Mitterfi rmiansreut almost a year earlier. To be sure, the Madonna’s epithets had made her figure accessible to the displaced, expelled, and disoriented. The body of Christ from Wies, however, offered an even more inclusive model of suffering. The original image, with its unequivocal portrayal of pain, was already less dependent on local types and individual tastes. A crucifi x commanded recognition among all Catholics—better still, all Christians. That said, there was little doubt that Sudeten Germans were especially prone to see themselves in it, and not only because it had once served their compatriots. Two of their earliest bestsellers in the immediate wake of the expulsion, Emil Gebauer’s Sudetendeutsches Golgatha (1946) and Father Emmanuel Reichenberger’s Sudetendeutsche Passion (1948), had transcribed expellee woes in Christological terms and primed the postwar vocabulary for Passional revivals. It was precisely Sudeten Germans, they had argued, who were the “limbs” of “Christ’s mystical body” delegated to endure “the unspeakable . . . for Germany and the entire German people.” 74 Of course, in the region known for its Catholicism the expulsion experience was not required to be able to relate to the figure with a narrative so widely familiar. The sculpture’s continued torment and eventual rescue, accessorized with a violation of an international boundary, set the stage for its cordial welcome in the parish. Tales of the statue’s deliverance had traction not only with the county residents or the promptly informed diocesan authorities. Thanks to thousands of pilgrims heading to Waldsassen in the summer of 1951—suffice it to say that in the face of the staggering ten thousand to fourteen thousand expected guests, the parish priest suffered a heart attack75—the new cult briskly gained a following far beyond the town’s limits. Year after year, the parish records triumphantly listed believers from “Nuremberg, Regensburg, Ber-

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lin, Rheinland Palatinate, Munich, [and even] Lower Austria” en route to worship the newcomer.76 The news of the figure’s arrival had a thrust both vaguely mythopoetic and clearly New Testamental. Dietl’s BBP colleague was an ideal candidate for the role of the manly hero who could both stand up for the Catholic faith and boost the BBP’s still shaky reputation as an institution with insufficient power. Villainous Czech soldiers, likewise, turned out to be a much better fit for the narrative of the ever more strictly enforced Cold War border than the dubious Communist guardian angels who may have rescued the figure in Mitterfi rmiansreut. With such a cast at their disposal, the BBP’s reports of the incident proffered a welcome occasion to portray the young West Germany as a safe haven for the faith, and its military and civil servants as the keepers of more than just the territorial border. Indeed, Dietl’s introduction was also a letter of safe conduct for an explicitly valuable image. Within a few sentences, it enumerated precisely the properties the absence of which had plagued Mitterfi rmiansreut’s Madonna. Among these, two stood out. The fi rst was the figure’s origin in a well-known pilgrimage site that, now destroyed, merited a replacement in the West. The second was the aesthetic quality of its former sacral environment, once a historic landmark. From the earliest days of its rescue, Christ’s figure was caught in a whirl of “relentless representation,” as ceaseless elaborations on the Passion story have been described, and the circumstances of its discovery invited the participation of all those who cared to contribute.77 Parishioners, pilgrims, and clerics were happy to oblige. As with other instances of defacement that have been documented over centuries, this incident was a “confused social event.” 78 The multilateral embrace of the figure—the parish priest Josef Wiesnet was already describing it as a “miraculous image” (Gnadenbild) in his very fi rst sermon, on account of its welcome—hardly translated into a coherent story. The issue, in part, was that Dietl’s note did not contain enough information, and the information that it did contain was incomplete. The original border police report, submitted to the regional BBP headquarters in Marktredwitz by Paul Hampel, a senior guard (Grenzoberjäger) who had observed the Czech doings and delivered the statue, was even terser. His description of the figure’s “torment” was limited to the “derisive manner” by which the Czechs had affi xed the sculpture to the bor-

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der structure.79 Much like the Gospel accounts of the Passion, the figure’s story begged for expansion. It accommodated additions, some true and others apocryphal. These started with a prelude to the February events. In October 1951, a former resident of Eger had recalled the slow dilapidation of the Wies pilgrimage church since 1949, when its premises had been emptied and the parsonage razed. Later, he noted without further elaboration, the sounds of popular music coming from within the abandoned church could be heard all the way across the border in the West. The blasphemy, he continued, was not limited to the profanation of the doomed sanctuary. In 1950 the crucifi x that would make its way into Waldsassen the following year had been seen to be dangling off the church belltower facing Bavarian Hundsbach for some ten days. The author also pointed out that Wies had been the cornerstone of a pilgrimage site since 1748, and the Czech misdemeanors, he liked to think, would not be left unavenged. Allegedly, on the day when the old church was set on fi re, one of the Czech arsonists had fallen victim to blood poisoning and died in a nearby hospital soon thereafter.80 As this anecdote makes clear, the term distortion (Entstellung), invoked by Dietl, could run the gamut from “misrepresentation” to “disfigurement,” and it would shape the ensuing cult in several important ways. The BBP and the local clergymen faced countless distortions waiting to be either averted or, conversely, exploited. What were they, and how would they be assessed? The fi rst concerned the legend itself; the second pertained to the statue’s physical image. With respect to the legend, witness accounts did not overlap. Whereas in Mitterfi rmiansreut, not a single witness to the event could be found, in Waldsassen there were too many, since Sudeten Germans were already at the border to observe the destruction of Wies. Their reports engendered threateningly divergent verities of the kind that Wiesnet’s successor Martin Rohrmeier sought to standardize in his ultimately less than successful appeal, published in the parochial newsletter more than a decade later, to consolidate the story.81 Especially weighty were the circumstantial divergences that stipulated what the episode’s narrative ought to include or leave out. Offenders, in contrast to those who had welcomed the sculpture in the West, mattered a great deal. Their identification, for one, had to do with assigning blame. Many expellee voices (not to mention Hampel himself) were quick to describe the transgression as condoned or even sanctioned

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by Czechoslovakia’s military authorities. Others, such as an anonymous addresser of a postcard to the Waldsassen church administration, scoffed at the pervasiveness of graphic imagery and drama. The response aimed primarily against the details in the postcard’s caption, which emphasized that “a German customs officer found the figure, noose around the neck, tied to a toll barrier.” A simple statement of the sculpture’s provenance, “the little old Baroque church in Wies, a settlement destroyed by Czechs,” would have been much more valuable than the petty minutiae of its peregrination across the divide, he or she proposed. And anyway, the correspondent continued, it was possible that frustrated Sudeten German farmers who had stayed behind, and not Czech soldiers, vandalized the figure. Whence, he or she wondered, all the “mystification”? Shrouding the event in further superstition, went the argument, would amount to a regress to “the Middle Ages.”82 And yet, “the Middle Ages,” primarily manifest in obsessive attention to the incident’s graphic or violent details and the lessons to be drawn from them, prevailed against such solitary voices. For one, accounts differed on the question of where exactly the sculpture had been found. At any other point in time, the issue of location might have been dismissed as inconsequential. Yet, it became an all-consuming preoccupation at a time when the future of the Cold War divide appeared ever more opaque. Would the Czech authorities continue to fortify the barrier? Would they merely maintain the status quo? Saying simply that the figure lay right at the border proved insufficient, and reports and sermons soon began a long-term search for a more memorable and more specific site to spotlight the event. Alleged locations alternated between the toll barrier, a boundary post, and even an antitank device.83 Far from trivial, these vignettes reflected worshippers’ perceptions, whether accurate or not, of the fortifications circa 1951. They also testified to efforts to mobilize the barrier for animating the incident and intensifying the event’s contingencies well after the initial rumors had settled. Elaborations upon the physical location to which the Christ figure was tied in February 1951 became the starting point for accounts of the sculpture’s most fundamental Entstellung—its physical disfigurement. The Iron Curtain became integral to the narrative of Cold War iconoclasm vanquished, since the Jesus, it was thought, had originally fallen “victim to world politics, or rather the partition between the Eastern and Western blocs.”84 Years of discussions assured that the abused figure would come to stand not simply for the amputated condition of the Sudeten German

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Heimat, but also, and fi rst and foremost, for the status of Christian faith during the Cold War—a faith unfl inching in the face of attack. This is where the image itself came into play. In the rush to deliver the figure to the proper clerical authorities, both Hampel and Dietl neglected to mention that the wooden body dangling at the border was missing its arms (fig. 12). And this “mutilation,” as it would soon be called, would carry much greater iconic potential than the vague “sacrilegious intent” reported in Dietl’s original letter. Numerous later accounts, including Hampel’s complete testimony recorded in 1964, set out to redress this significant omission by zeroing in on the fact that the image had escaped the fi re without “showing substantial evidence of burns.” The border police report of 10 March 1951 spoke of this “defi led image,” describing its handover to the church in unexpectedly unbureaucratic terms—expressing the “deep shock” that the figure had evoked and characterizing the priest who had received it as having been “moved” by the occasion. The question now was: When and how exactly did the figure lose its arms? In April of that same year, one expellee monthly remarked matterof-factly that “Christ’s corpus from Wies, crushed by the Czechs, was brought to the toll barrier at Waldsassen and hung here.”85 Beyond that, there was little clarity. Testimony published in the early 1960s, for instance, suggested that it was the alleged Czech offenders who had “shattered the cross, shot at and mutilated the Christ figure.”86 In the end, local churchgoers and expellee visitors were not alone in being confused. When Georg Schroubek was investigating the new pilgrimage site at Waldsassen for his survey of piety and belonging in the mid-1960s, he spent months waiting for a clear answer about the “defi led” or “mutilated Savior,” but Father Rohrmeier did not have one.87 It was an answer the priest desperately wanted to fi nd or, if not, to assemble from scraps of testimony. If anything, he found the fickleness of the narratives around the Christ figure to be increasingly more unnerving. In a pastoral newsletter issued in late June 1964, he expressed his determination to elicit at least “somewhat certain statements about who defi led the cross, where it was hung, who saw it fi rst, who transported it across the border, etc.” Hampel was among the very few respondents whose account found its way into the parochial archive, and his story became a decisive milestone in the narrative’s codification—a process in which the violent imagery mounted and the characteristics of the wrongdoers became increasingly subordinated to already existing iconographic, and specifically Christian, prototypes.

figure 12. Kurt Scherbaum, the “mutilated Savior,” 1951. PfaArch–W, GH. Courtesy of Archiv Katholisches Stadtpfarramt Waldsassen.

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Like other attempts to clarify what had taken place in early February 1951, Hampel’s testimony began with the destruction of Wies, virtually complete by February 1951.88 On the eve of the church’s fi nal demolition, Hampel explained, the Czechs had used heavy logs to set up a roadblock about eight to ten meters away from the West German toll barrier. From his hiding place on the western side, he had observed how a military truck dropped off five soldiers, two with guns in hand, at the structure. Among their other arms were crowbars, axes, and saws, ostensibly for tearing up the floor in the neighboring house. It was a cold day, and during their breaks the soldiers warmed themselves at a fi re between the roadblock and a German toll barrier. Once the flames had begun to subside, one of the Czechs disappeared into the village. Hampel was then surprised some minutes later by what he thought was the sound of prayer, so he picked up his binoculars. What he saw was the returning soldier approaching the fi re carrying a crucifi x in front of him in a mock procession. The Czech then leaned his load against the logs and “kicked it with his foot until it broke into small pieces.” The other soldiers looked on “impassively” as “he tore off the Savior with both hands, breaking off the arms,” and tossed both the cross and the figure into the fi re. As we know, the episode was not yet over, and Hampel’s narrative picks up momentum as it approaches a resolution. Whereas the fi rst half of Hampel’s testimony is spiked with subordinate clauses that qualify and explain, the dénouement, punctuated by the statue’s hanging, is stripped down to a syntactic minimum. The protocol staggers short clauses in fastpaced succession to deliver unadorned high-impact prose: “About five minutes later the soldier took the figure out of the fi re again, wrapped some cord (telephone cable) lying nearby around its neck, attached the other end of the cord to a one-meter-long roof beam, and stuck [the image] above the fi re between two logs in the roadblock.” On the one hand, the breathlessness of the sentence belies the fact that Hampel is relating an incident that had occurred more than ten years earlier. On the other hand, the absence of any descriptive embellishments—the statement contains no adjectives other than the dryly factual “one-meter-long”— suggests a lack of both sentiment and a contemplative immersion into the religious pull of the witnessed event. The string of verbs—“took,” “wrapped,” “attached,” and “suspended”—is evocative of a page from a technical manual rather than a witness’s notes on a felt moment of devotional significance. The suite of accompanying nouns—“fi re,” “cord,” “beam,” and “logs”—does little to dispel this impression. And yet, if the

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account’s wording exudes cool objectivity, it is not because Hampel is speaking with detachment, but because he has vested the named objects with prominent roles. Above all, it must have mattered to him, enough to merit a parenthetical comment, that at stake was not just any wire. Why? Strewn around the borderland, pieces of telephone cable attested to the inchoate rupture of communications in the recharted landscape. Indeed, as Dario Gamboni has observed, “the literal fall of [the image] seems to be predestined to symbolize the metaphorical fall of the regime that had ordered its erection.”89 A physical instrument essential for bringing about such a fall, the wire stood for the receding era’s end, on which the crowbars, axes, and saws had put the fi nal touch. On a par with the gutted houses, the cut-off phone lines, and the slumping barns, the cord also was an echo of wartime and of postwar reprisals, when hanging was the punishment generously meted out to real and alleged traitors, fi rst Czech and then German. Yet, its presence alluded not only to the continued breakdown of what had once been but also to the making of something new. The bits of cable were simultaneously a throwback to the waning postwar order, laced with traces of ethnic Germans about to be obliterated, as well as the tool with which the new Cold War order was being shaped. These pieces signified destruction and construction alike. Only with their help could Jesus, as a symbol of bygone times, be wedged, or in Hampel’s words, “stuck,” directly into the barrier as it was being built. The staccato of the testimony underscored that the foundation of the confl ict’s signature edifice rested on the desecration of Christian icons—that the icon curtain and the Iron Curtain were two sides of the same coin. The pieces of cable were even more significant with regard to the fate of the figure itself. Their adoption as the tools of a latter-day iconoclasm went beyond the impact of ordinary implements. They “amplified” and updated the Passion, to borrow James Marrow’s wording, pitching into the centuries-old repository of the story’s “increasingly detailed, provocative, and moving treatments.”90 As Marrow’s work on expansions of the laconic Passion episode in the Gospels suggests, by the twentieth century such a departure from tradition was, in effect, a kind of tradition in itself. It was thus not unusual for the ongoing upheaval to add to the already dense religious vocabulary of suffering. While crowbars, axes, and saws would have been a much more predictable choice for the iconographic tradition of the arma Christi (i.e., the instruments of the Pas-

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sion prominent in devotional practices since the Middle Ages), the use of telephone cable was distinctly novel. Once a conduit for the human voice and ethereal messages, the cable evoked the immateriality integral also to Jesus’s ultimate transcendence of the flesh. To sever it from its primary use as a communication circuit, in contrast, draws attention to its material significance. The wire became an object without which this particular redemptive narrative would not have come to fruition, as Jesus might not have otherwise been sentenced to dangling off the makeshift border rampart in such a debasing manner. Moreover, in the absence of the cord the memory of the Passion would have remained arrested in time as well. The unexplained appearance of the wire pieces interfered with the habitual mnemonic mechanisms behind the recall of the Christian story, since Catholic devotional literature has never had much to say about the use of electric lines. A noose of telephone cable around someone’s neck, even if that neck is made of wood, undercuts the “pervasive familiarity” of a plot that is otherwise a source of reassurance to believers.91 For someone like Rohrmeier, this was the most valuable effect of Hampel’s seemingly insignificant parenthetical remark. The mention of the cable snippet, syntactically set apart from the rest of the text, made the believer pause. An incongruous piece of evidence worthy of a murder mystery, it forced him to think. It mobilized the imagination to create a new union between centuries-old conventions and current political exigencies. In contrast to the timeless arma Christi, the cable conjured up modern times, jolting the believer into the realization of such a temporal jump. The wire’s pieces stood both for modernity’s self-destructive thrust and for its relentless logic of progress that is compelled to remove all vestiges of religion as hurdles to advancement. What is more, the wire prefigures key moments in the history of twentieth-century iconoclasm—for example, the deposed statues of Communist leaders, airborne with ropes coiled around their necks as if to stage an execution.92 Indeed, the intentionally demeaning significance of the noose did not escape Hampel. “As if hanging on a gallows,” our witness ruefully remarked, “the Christ statue now dangled over the fi re area.” The improvised gallows was, in this case, an extraordinary instance, as well as an extraordinarily cruel one, of Christ’s Passion extended into the present. Consequently, in the minds of its Cold War recipients, the hanging sculpture did not merely embody its referent, Jesus, and his suffering; the image of Jesus once venerated by Sude-

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ten Germans in Wies, they thought, had suffered its own ordeal collateral to the Passion story. The anguish of the current historical moment compounded the timeless pain infl icted by the crucifi xion. Its resulting “power [therefore] resided wholly in [its] visual particularity”—that is, in the figure’s broken arms.93 Thanks to them, the sculpture was no longer just a representation—it was a presence in its own right. It was not an accident that for years the fate of this figure has roused metaphors even in those who live hundreds of miles away from Waldsassen. Among them was a priest from the Austrian town of Kronstorf, not far from Linz, who seized the opportunity to meditate on the “barbed wire, bitter and merciless like the Lord’s crown of thorns” in his newspaper address published around Easter time in 1957. And although barbed wire played no role in the trials of the battered Christ, the figure’s “mutilation” at the Iron Curtain sufficed to enable the simile and appoint the torso as a Cold War touchstone for the state of religion in the East and the West alike.94

A Christian Ethos for the Borderlands Not surprisingly, this interstitial role also forged the rump’s discovery and rescue into grounds for the Cold War reconnaissance of “the nefarious events beyond the limits of the Christian world,” as a Sudeten German visitor put it in 1971.95 The BBP quickly realized that the episode was rife with possibilities for collecting intelligence. According to Waldsassen’s former head customs officer, local discussion of the episode between 1951 and 1953, and especially conversations between border officials and the priest, were used to draw conclusions “about the Czech border guards’ psychological, ethical, religious, and ideological frame of mind.” In the long run, “such fi ndings were in the significant professional interest of German border authorities.”96 Even more importantly, watchfulness over the East helped keep the ethical, religious, and ideological integrity of the West’s boundaries in sharper focus—and not only those of West Germany. The “defi led savior” functioned as an interface for consolidating the small community, on the one hand, and opening it up to visitors, on the other. As the crux of a newfound covenant between the initially stratified natives and the expellees, the figure may not have created a broader consensus that would spill beyond the region. But in that region at least, it did affi rm the

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faith-based cohesion of the Western Bloc’s eastern boundary and served as a reminder that Christianity could uphold a united front, with Waldsassen in the vanguard. The sculpture was the vehicle that brought the small town of Waldsassen one step closer to its ambitious goal of becoming a “radiant center of religious and pastoral life.” 97 This new engagement and the consensus of believers from all walks of life belied earlier apprehensions about the religious and cultural void that existed in the borderlands, and perhaps even fi lled that void. The figure’s reception harnessed the “Christian ethos,” as Schroubek put it, among all ages and professions. Indeed, soon after the incident, use of the signature “Catholics of the borderland” became common on the various documents submitted to the diocesan authorities on behalf of Rohrmeier and his congregants.98 Christ’s cordial welcome in Waldsassen provided those concerned about the dwindling faith in the West with a poster example of religion’s grit. Such affi rmation weighed especially heavily given the borders’ aforementioned notoriety as a “zone of permanent exceptionality.”99 Under no circumstances, argued one local observer, should the incident be interpreted as “a singular manifestation of barbarism” poised to “surrender the Christian rump Europe to materialism of the Bolshevik kind.” On the contrary, the event was a symptom for what had “dangerously spread along [the interior side of] our borders,” therefore requiring concerted action on the home front.100 In the face of such anxiety, the 1951 fi nd promoted the area’s coalescence into a stalwart bulwark of the West, its expressly Christian rim. Waldsassen’s proximity to the Iron Curtain, embodied in the sculpture’s absent arms, soon became instrumental in efforts to champion the town both within the bishopric and in the Catholic Church at large. In contrast to Mitterfi rmiansreut, the Cold War divide at Walsassen, now physically entwined with Jesus’s body, became an invaluable asset. With some swagger, the local laypeople compared Waldsassen to pilgrimage sites that, they alleged, merely satisfied visitors’ morbid curiosity, such as the controversial cult of Therese Neumann’s stigmata in nearby Konnersreuth. Their hometown, by constrast, lured politically minded pilgrims. When the parochial council decided to petition for the church’s promotion to a papal Basilica minor in the mid-1950s—a process that took until 1969 to complete—its letters to the diocesan authorities in Regensburg put the cult of the “greatly revered” and “defi led savior” on the list of its most recent improvements, right next to the expensive interior

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renovations (1955–67), dust abatement (1964), and organ repair (1964– 65).101 To contemporaries, the housekeeping flair was neither petty nor mundane. Along with the church’s Baroque-clad saint relics, solemnly encased in ornate gilded glass caskets, Christ’s torso counted as the latest means of “especially efficacious protection” of the spiritual kind.102 Even in the absence of significant cross-border traffic, laypeople announced in a letter to the bishop, every visitor should see that “Catholic life indeed thrives right along the suture between East and West and that the Iron Curtain is being countervailed precisely in the ecclesiastic realm.”103 Backed by his congregants, Rohrmeier, a passionate advocate of the construction of another borderland chapel in Hatzenreuth, the county’s “model village,” practiced what he preached. And what he preached was a Cold War maxim that caught on easily: “Let there be as many churches at the border as there are watchtowers [in the East]” (Soviele Wachttürme—soviele Kirchen an der Grenze).104 The prayer wall would be Rohmeier’s dream come true.

The Abused Body on Camera Still, the figure’s success and the expanding range of its meanings can be attributed neither solely to its use for political mobilization nor to the mythmaking that surrounded it. Without doubt, the accounts of the sculpture’s “mutilation” on the frontlines of the Cold War animated the body to the point that it was easy to forget that it was only a representation. By bringing to life the evangelist’s dictum of the word turned to flesh (John 1:14), the legends made the figure appear confusingly humanlike, abused yet tenacious. Compared to Günther’s depiction of Christ draped over the barbs of the Iron Curtain, the stories about the Waldsassen crucifi x made the statue resistant to metaphorical treatments, claiming for it the authentic corporeal suffering of an early flesh-and-blood victim of Europe’s division. The turn toward the incarnate was not new: more than a thousand years of iconoclastic acts had left behind a plentiful record of sculptures being treated as human, “buried, beheaded, and banished.”105 Besides, the crucified Jesus especially had long constituted an ambivalent conjunction between bodily presence and mimetic likeness. The havoc of postwar violence and the unsettled materiality of the Cold War border only fueled further conflations along these lines. Yet, soon enough, this interest in the living flesh eased its grip on peo-

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ples’ minds. Instead, the figure’s aesthetic properties, the theme of this section, became the focus of its worshippers and claimed a large share of its reception. Once the initial tumult surrounding the sculpture had settled down in the spring of 1951, the torso’s importance as an artifact, rather than as an animate entity, regained ground among its caretakers. What kind of image was it? How could its qualities be showcased and highlighted best? Where did it fit on the West German landscape of piety? The torso’s newly secured future, pondered alongside its recent past, invited these questions and kindled a growing recognition of its value as an object. This new focus resulted in the wide dissemination of reproductions of the sculpture, primarily photographic. In due course, these reproductions would adapt the three-dimensional figure to the codes of two-dimensional media, and even to a painterly aesthetic. But fi rst the question of Jesus’s place in his new physical home had to be resolved. Indeed, the rise of “an unremarkable . . . sculpture,” as the figure was retrospectively described, to a symbol of religion’s abuse across the divide went hand in hand with the above-mentioned ascent of what had been a peripheral abbey church to a papal stronghold on the West’s eastern margins.106 At fi rst glance, the scale of these two processes, let alone of the objects involved, appeared disproportionate. Christ’s modestly sized torso was hardly a match for the church’s opulent “frescos, stucco work, lavish interior décor, . . . artful side altars, [and] resplendent choir stalls.” Yet, this impression was short-lived. Roughly at the same time as the church repairs got under way, clerics and the parochial lay leadership embarked on a long-term effort to make the figure blend in with the overall “splendid harmony” of the premises. After all, there had been a long-standing artistic connection between Waldsassen and such West Bohemian locales as Wies, and this was a suitable occasion to naturalize that link. The fact that the church’s “splendid harmony” derived, in the fi rst place, from representations “of Christ and Mary’s acts of redemption” mitigated the initial contrast between the sculpture’s dented surface and the immaculate alabaster magnificence of the church’s interior.107 And yet, this doctrinal content could only achieve so much in moderating the torso’s incorporation into its new home. Without appropriate attention to physical form, content alone proved insufficient. The torso’s rise in stature hinged on its aesthetic equalization with the ambient interior. Three conduits facilitated this shift: additional physical adornment; attention to provenance; and photographic representation. Their interrelatedness attested to the fact that the torso’s aesthetic merit

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was not so much its fundamental condition as it was a fluid, negotiable, and rather unpredictable aspect, one determined by input from above as well as below, since participants on all sides deemed the sculpture to be nothing if not investment-worthy. The fi rst challenge was most obviously connected to the rump’s new location, since Jesus’s “dignified framing” struck clerics as just the right complement to the church’s décor. Already in his earliest sermons, on the occasion of the sculpture’s rescue, Wiesnet had invoked the framing of the object ambiguously, as a metaphor for the architectural environment and as the actual physical casing of the image proper (fig. 13). Metaphorically, framing implied that the figure’s appearance would be compatible with the magnificence of the church already by virtue of its being displayed in the midst of this sacral opulence. The radiance of the architectural space, in other words, provided adequate highlighting for an object with this difficult a fate, so that now what may have otherwise remained an unsightly fragment could not but rise to match its noble

figure 13. The “mutilated Savior,” Waldsassen Basilica. Photo by the author.

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environs. To quote Freedberg, “Pilgrimage images generally give the impression of being rather rude and rudimentary; but in every case the preoccupation is evidently to ensure that they are aesthetically differentiated, adorned, or specially housed.”108 From the material standpoint, a physical frame, commissioned soon after the figure’s discovery and fi nanced by the owner of a mineral water fountain in neighboring Kondrau, reassured that the statue was indeed a work of art. The frame defi ned the sculpture as an “entity fulfi lled within itself,” to borrow Georg Simmel’s expression. The locally chiseled dark wooden casing with undulating neo-baroque edges restored a kind of integrity to the armless fragment. It helped to draw the connection between the “continuously flowing energies and materials” of the historical processes that had stripped the crucifi x down to a rump and the self- contained artifact that this rump was becoming.109 Christ still had the appearance of an armless torso, but few were tempted to search for its lost limbs. On the contrary, those were, as one visitor noted, the body parts that “one no longer want[ed] to restore.”110 The elaborately carved panel, to which Christ’s body was attached by late 1951, signaled that the fragment was worth more than the once-complete whole. The loss of the arms, once nailed to a cross, also marked a step toward the object’s emancipation from the ritual conventions that typically bind a crucifi x. This is not to say that the torso was now an autonomous work of art: it continued to function in a devotional setting. But it no longer circulated as originally intended—and this change induced shifts in signification.111 Although the cruciform background remained integral to the new frame’s interior, the ornate exterior was too unwieldy for processional uses and too indistinct for display in the chancel, at a considerable distance from the congregants. The figure was no longer part and parcel of a seasonally peripatetic object. Instead, the curves of the casing anchored the torso to the church walls and limited its mobility to a very few solemn occasions, such as the community’s pilgrimage to Rome in 1962. These new restrictions were as much a gain as a loss. Once framed, the figure claimed a much greater expanse of wall space. It was less likely to dissolve in the vast nave. The generous dark surface of the frame enveloped the slender torso, setting it apart from the starkly white surroundings and putting it on display. Suddenly, even its scale had more substance: a devotee in the late 1950s remembered the small, 80-centimeterlong rump as “rather large, so that every visitor unwittingly glanced at

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it.”112 In this perception, the sculpture commanded greatness in both size and redemptive potential, and the physical frame suggested an object that was devotional as much as it was aesthetic. The qualities allegedly intrinsic to the work and confi rmed by its pedigreed provenance served as yet another source for the torso’s aestheticization. Contemporaries turned a blind eye to the figure’s “artistic insignificance” as a copy and paid little attention to the eighteenth-century chronicles that listed the figure as a second-degree replica of an actual miracle-working crucifi x.113 The object’s value was, at this point, constituted in the eye of the Cold War–era beholder, and not assessed by experts on Bohemian sacred art. In its announcement of the rump’s discovery only a week after it had been rescued, the local paper had touted it as an “artistically valuable” object that had fallen victim to an act of “blasphemy that constitutes vandalism against culture (Kulturschande).” The latter term, also the article’s single-word headline, related the sculpture to the multifaceted German debates on culture and preservation in the wake of World War II. Most frequently, Kulturschande was invoked to shame architectural modernists who seemed all too willing to dispense with the history and tradition still resident in the ruins. Similar considerations of value, if not conventional beauty, also informed KarasekLanger’s outline of the changing devotional patterns in Bavaria. There, the “valuable” torso was favorably contrasted with the Mitterfi rmiansreut Madonna, which was characterized as merely “time-honored.”114 The insistence on the figure’s worth resonated with the centuries-old adage that believers ought to worship “not any old crucifi x . . . but a ‘wellmade’ one.”115 In the case of Waldsassen, the merits of the torso’s established origins helped justify the spontaneity of the cult around it and counter the fears that haunted Mitterfi rmiansreut. Still, no matter how extensive, the aforementioned steps toward aesthetic equalization did not allow the torso’s supporters to rest. The aestheticizing mission was not over—and how could it be in the age of mechanical reproduction? Father Wiesnet and his successors recognized that the figure’s ascent to the status of an art object could neither feed off the ambient afterglow nor rely on provenance exclusively. Disseminating “likenesses of this defi led Christ,” as the local priest put it, loomed large on the agenda of local clerics who felt that words alone could not capture the vividness of the image. After all, for believers who could not visit the site, a pictorial impression of the torso’s transformation would be a must. For this purpose, photography was the most obvious choice of medium.

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Without a doubt, expellee pilgrims took plenty of amateur snapshots, typically frontal views of the figure in its wooden frame, to illustrate their own stories in the press. Yet their unchanging, head-on compositions left behind a trail of static images that did not deliver the sense of the dynamic momentum that had swept up the figure in 1951. To capture just that, Wiesnet and, after 1958, Rohrmeier, enlisted the help of professional photographers, launching a veritable whirl of torso visualizations. Indeed, “the portrayal of this ‘defi led Christ,’” recalled Waldsassen’s custodian (Heimatpfleger) Robert Treml, “was frequently disseminated in clerical circles,” not only in the press.116 The singular form of “portrayal” is symptomatic: over the years, the sculpture’s photographs, widely disparate in their individual artistic merits, functioned as milestones in a single aestheticizing project. They injected the torso with an increasing sense of pictorial drama that did not exist in the three- dimensional original. In contrast to the rarely pictured Madonna at Mitterfi rmiansreut, photographic images accompanied the Waldsassen torso from the very early days of its arrival in West Germany. Their earliest purpose was to provide proof of the statue’s existence. This documentary impetus did little to hinder the bias or emotional investment that surrounded the statue, especially since images of Christ, as images in general, are commonly “coded to resemble the interests of those who depicted him.”117 In Waldsassen, the priests who commissioned the pictures and the believers who clamored for them made the images fit their own expectations and experiences. Yet, the photographers’ concerns had an added level of complexity. Photography of Jesus as practiced since the late nineteenth century—in reenactments by artists or models—has been an exception to the medium’s usual documentary conceit. In the obvious physical absence of the subject, the representation of Jesus was left entirely to “the artist’s imagination.”118 The cause of the “defi led Savior,” however, mobilized the cast-off documentary impulse once again. The torso’s role as both object and subject, which its photographs had to acknowledge, furthered this project. The rump was certainly not Jesus, but a wooden sculpture, a target of art-historical cataloguing and study. At the same time, it was Jesus’s incarnation, enduring pain and privation in the Cold War present. If nineteenth-century pioneers of the genre, such as Fred Holland Day, had been rumored to starve themselves for days to produce credible Jesus impersonations on camera, the Wald-

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sassen torso had no need for induced hardship to authenticate the violence done to it. Professional photographers approached the sculpture from various angles to convey the panoply of visible physical suffering, both original as well as that caused by the “mutilation” of the statue at the border. The formal aspects of the resulting portrayals were frequently more compositionally ambitious than the straightforward goal of documenting the rump’s disfigurement would have necessitated. Already the fi rst black-and-white image of the torso gives an idea of the trajectory that such ambitions followed. Enclosed with one of the earliest reports of the figure’s discovery, by mid-February 1951 the photograph had made its way to the archives of the abbey church, to the local paper, and even to the Bishopric of Regensburg (fig. 12).119 Kurt Scherbaum, one of Waldsassen’s resident photographers, captured the Christ figure in artificial lighting against a stark white background. The high-contrast resolution spotlighted the body’s wounds, new and old, all the more pronounced in the absence of any cruciform structure in the back. With unforgiving sharpness, the image rendered Jesus’s pale flesh dull from its most recent ordeals, and the figure’s dark hair as well as the loincloth are sullied and scratched. The photograph commingled the body’s “manly beauty” with “the terror of a detailed representation,” spotlighting Jesus’s new handicap, the absent arms, with knife-sharp precision.120 In a long sinuous line, the body fi lled the space practically from top to bottom. The sides, in contrast, remained conspicuously blank, drawing attention to the missing limbs, to the figure’s overall severance from its ritual environment, and, fi nally, to the isolation of the rump from any identifiable moment in the Gospel story. Originating in the late Middle Ages, devotional images of the Man of Sorrows had already established the tradition of depicting Jesus’s hands detached from the cross and his body arranged in an upright line so as to display all his wounds on a single axis. The resulting density “encapsulated Christ’s suffering for mankind” and propelled “the desire to share in this suffering.”121 Scherbaum’s photograph, joining the visual repository of florid Catholic piety, fed off this pervasive desire and reproduced it in glossy black-and-white multiples. By referencing the ostentatio vulnerum (display of wounds), evocative of the Man of Sorrows, the image brought the violated body to the fore. Yet, this time the wounds were not localizable in familiar places. Especially the wrists, commonly bearing nails or stigmata, were absent altogether. To showcase the lack and to

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represent the absence—not only in temporal terms, as photography by defi nition arrests an already elapsed moment, but also in terms of physical loss—was the main challenge. To this end, Scherbaum pictured the torso entirely by itself, with little to distract from its most glaring deficits. In the absence of more eloquent sources, the composition became an important storytelling tool and compensatory testimony. For one, the act of defacement on 6 February 1951 had not been documented on camera—yet what would believing be without seeing? Then, the sculpture’s appearance did not lend itself to a “lavish” display of “the iconography of human destructiveness,”122 familiar to us from Bartl’s vignette of iconoclastic excesses on the streets of Eger. Scherbaum’s photograph had to fi ll the resulting gap. It was up to its layout to portray a second-degree martyrdom. The accent on the absent arms negated the body’s otherwise prominent horizontal axis. If, prior to its disfigurement, the Wies crucifi x served as a synecdoche for the Passion in its entirety, the lone Jesus figure drew attention to the forcible physical truncation of that already condensed moment. Removed from its original setting as much as from the conventional typologies of devotional imagery by a wanton act of destruction, this modern Christ, the image seemed to suggest, suffered off the cross. Still, despite the missing arms, or perhaps because of them, the image exuded defiance. The scratches, as the figure’s miraculous survival in the flames proved, had etched the surface only. Just as with Christ’s torso, it followed, the core of Christianity itself could be presumed intact, deposited for preservation, literally as well as figuratively, in the West German borderlands. Scherbaum’s frontal lighting, however, cast the figure’s tenacity as having more than strictly devotional significance when it contoured the torso with a dark shadow that was part saintly nimbus, part body outline on a Cold War crime scene. The ambivalent gray rim reflected the medium’s deep-seated uncertainties. On the one hand, it seemed like a somber substitute for art’s auratic glow, shattered, as Walter Benjamin had once suggested, by the advent of mechanical reproduction. On the other hand, the image supported the idea that reproduction can “engende[r] a new and compelling aura of its own.”123 An oblique commentary on photography’s indeterminacy, the gray outline inaugurated the battered torso’s new life in pictures. Vehicles for “shaping popular understanding of the Passion at different moments in history,” the photographs of the Waldsassen Jesus deployed the rump to bring Western civilian views of the Cold War borderlands into focus.124

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Of course, not every such image communicated shades of meaning as variegated as Scherbaum’s shot. In 1962, for example, Schnell and Steiner, a Munich publisher, reproduced a much more conventional frontal view of the framed Christ on several thousand color postcards.125 The publisher’s attractive offer—only 18 pfennig per card, or 900 German marks for 5,000 cards—could not have been timelier. Just around this time, groups in and beyond West Germany, among them the Catholic Women’s Movement of the Linz diocese in Austria, were urging the rectory to popularize pictorial evidence of the figure’s maltreatment.126 Earlier still, representatives of Nüttgens, a “fi lm and image” publisher in Düsseldorf, had requested a photograph of the torso for their illustrated supplement to a new catechism titled Fool Not around with God’s Name (Mit Gottes Namen treibe keinen Unfug).127 To satisfy the growing demand for Christ’s Cold War suffering, Rohrmeier responded quickly, showing savvy with an eye to both profit and publicity, and the postcard briskly sold out among visitors. The rectory’s aforementioned anonymous correspondent, for instance, had not only paid the substantial 40 pfennig for the copy on which he would pen his objections to the excessively “medieval” treatment of the figure’s story, but he also had acquired a stash of the postcards to hand out to acquaintances. One such proxy network reached further still. On 21 August 1962, only a month and a half following the printing of the stock, Rohrmeier received a letter from a resident of the small Franconian town of Heilsbronn—an indirect assurance of just how successful the torso’s decadelong pictorial promotions had been. Rather sheepishly, Wilhelm Bauer, the letter writer, explained that his wife had gotten hold of a Schnell and Steiner postcard from her cleaning lady, an “old honest woman from the Bohemian Forest.” And while this familial constellation betrayed the enduring social disparity between the locals and the expellees, Bauer advertised both contingents as equal in being “staunch Catholics.” Regardless of his physical distance from the borderlands, as a freelance journalist, Bauer appeared eager to do his bit to cement Catholic solidarity—described, in a comparable context, as “a Christian-inspired discourse of unity”—in order to strengthen the borderlands as the West’s spiritual rampart.128 Albeit still incredulous of the torso’s story and begging for explanation, Bauer did not hesitate to offer his professional services to “turn this sad episode over to the press”—“not only Catholic publications, but also larger dailies” in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Mu-

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nich.129 Despite his conspicuous lack of familiarity with the incident, he believed that the story could also hold sway in Protestant areas, and could even attract secular readers. If seeing the postcard may not have yet equaled believing for some, the letter implied, then coming across the publisher’s matrix reproduced in a mainstream paper certainly would. If looking “constitutes a powerful practice of belief,” as David Morgan noted in his seminal study, then, according to Bauer, all that was needed to ensure the cult’s success in Germany’s south was to have more people look.130 His endorsement of the torso intended to multiply the number of visual encounters and thus nurture the broadest consensus possible. Written after the last significant gap in the East-West border—Berlin— had been closed in August 1961, Bauer’s appeal suggested that the more than ten-year-old incident on the Cold War periphery had lost none of its currency. Although the trail of his correspondence with Rohrmeier breaks off, Bauer’s inquiry speaks volumes to the importance of reproducible images for linking locals and expellees, clergy and laity, the borderland’s faraway observers and its inhabitants. The fact that his volunteering turned out to be belated—the Sudeten German Ackermann-Gemeinde, a Catholic expellee organization, had already seen to the photograph’s publication in the press—only confi rms the pivotal role of such pictures in putting religion on the cultural and political map of Cold War–era Central Europe. The postcard had its own share in the torso’s aesthetic promotion, even if its part did not match that of Scherbaum’s photograph. Although hardly the “fi rst art form for an unlettered person,”131 postcards, too, claimed proximity to the arts from their early days in the late nineteenth century. Their relationship to aesthetics was symbiotic: they shaped a popular defi nition of art and used the outcome to legitimate themselves as such. By virtue of advertising the objects that they depicted, they aspired to increase these artifacts’ value. As they relied on photography’s proverbial epiphanic ability to reveal its objects’ properties in almost magical ways, they underscored their own contingency with such haloed works.132 They co-constituted art as much as they claimed to carry forth some of its radiance. To pick up where such images left off and enhance the torso’s appeal, in the remaining decades of the Cold War professional photographers with studios in Waldsassen continued to adjust camera angles and exposure lengths. In the early 1960s, one of them, Hans Zirlik, abandoned

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figure 14. Hans Zirlik, the “mutilated Savior,” undated, ca. 1960. PfaArch–W, GH. Courtesy of Archiv Katholisches Stadtpfarramt Waldsassen.

the full frontal view in favor of a much more proximate lateral vantage point (fig. 14). In the outcome, the artistic canon manifested itself more vocally than ever before. Zirlik’s close-up zoomed in on Christ’s face rimmed with the crown of thorns. Evocative of Holland Day’s famous Seven Last Words of Jesus (1898), an image with its own extensive aesthetic lineage,133 the shot exhibited a kindred pictorialist sensibility that strained its purpose as a representation of a representation. The photograph’s stylized appearance challenged its ostensible function as a mere documentary detail shot. There was, once again, the “nondescript background,” yet its function had little in common with either the blank canvas of Scherbaum’s picture or the delimiting wooden frame on location.134 Rather than putting the figure on display or providing a tentative indication of its value, the neutral backdrop isolated the head to stage a portrait of a makebelieve living being on the brink of death. And a painterly portrait it was. The chipped pigment of the locks softly dissolved into the white

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background on the left and sculpted a three-dimensional chiaroscuro illusion on the right and in the center. The change in the angle conveyed a sense of intimacy, and the camera’s allusion to a solicitous or even empathetic glance right into Jesus’s otherwise averted face invited the viewer to commiserate with the protagonist. The three-quarters angle communicated a hint of movement transfi xed, as if the camera had arrested Christ midway through turning his head either toward or away from the viewer. On the lower edge, the diffused view made the head forcefully emerge from the seemingly indeterminate pale haze. “When we survey [mass-produced images],” notes Freedberg, “we are likely to be struck by just how telling are these adaptations of high and fancy art.”135 The most sophisticated photographs of the Waldsassen Christ communicated precisely this aspiration and reflected its dialogue with established artistic techniques. Like its high art precursors, Zirlik’s relatively modest attempt at photographing Jesus gestured toward what Kristin Schwain has dubbed “the protocols of viewing” and what Morgan terms “the mimetic covenant”— the visual conventions that steer the beholder’s experience. To “eclipse the two thousand years separating Christ and his representation,” such cues rely on “standard depictions of the sacred subject” and strive to reconcile Jesus’s roles as a “historic agent” and a “contemporary presence.”136 In defiance of the temporal distance to their subject, they aim to produce as authentic a likeness as possible. At fi rst glance, the portrait-like format of Zirlik’s photograph appears to draw on this kind of referential know-how. The turn of the camera toward Christ’s face, for instance, echoes acheiropoetic images (images not made by hand), among which Veronica’s sudarium, a cloth with an imprint of Jesus’s face on the way to Golgotha, is frequently described as the forerunner of the photographic process. Yet, traces of such remote prototypes hardly exhaust the spectrum of meanings in Zirlik’s image. His photograph was more than an instrument of time compression aimed at “integrat[ing] the historic and represented Christ.”137 The expressive powers of the image were unconfi ned to its well-articulated and sharply focused upper part showing the face. Instead of limiting himself to a conventional head shot, with Christ’s suffering face as the singular focus, Zirlik put together a two-partite composition. The upper half belonged to the head, while the maimed body determined the significance of the lower half. In contrast to Holland Day’s Seven Last Words, Zirlik’s image did not truncate the close-up at the collarbone, but went on

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to include Christ’s shoulders and the onset of the missing forearms, rendered in soft focus and eventually fading into a milky blur. The picture’s implicit horizontal split around the middle, at the tip of the beard, showcased the absence of the severed limbs. The dissolving view at the bottom of the frame gave the shoulder line a diffuse yet tenacious contour. Albeit caught in the process of vanishing, this line refused to disappear entirely. Its persistence symbolically mirrored the two intertwined narratives that shaped civilian views of the Cold War borderlands since the early 1950s. The fi rst was the story of the Jesus figure from Wies surviving the flames at the border. The second was that of Christianity at large, rescued from its precarious postwar position in the East by the emerging prayer wall. Furthermore, the two-partite structure of Zirlik’s image conjoined several disparate historical moments and pictorial modalities, rather than obscuring some at the expense of others. First, it bridged the Passion’s transhistorical dimension with its significance at a specific twentieth-century juncture. Likewise, it connected the ordeal of the human Christ’s perpetual Passion with the physical assault on an inanimate figure. Such confluences suggested that at this point in time, erasing the “signs of the contemporary” for the sake of biblical verity, as Schwain put it, was neither necessary nor desirable.138 Conversely, the image received its ultimate meaning in the present. Second, the photograph’s structure closed the representational gap between an iconic imago and narrative historia that has conditioned Western reception of devotional art since the Middle Ages.139 While the upper half of the image spoke to conventions of portraiture and delivered an appropriately pained icon to fulfi ll the viewer’s expectations of redemptive suffering, the lower half demanded the story of this particular sculpture’s defacement. The contoured ridge of Christ’s shoulders invited the beholder to fi ll in this physical blank with his or her own exegesis of the Waldsassen incident and ponder its significance in the political circumstances of the era. The broken- off shoulder line thrust the icon-like portrait from isolation into its Cold War context. Over several decades, multiple photographic reproductions of the “mutilated Savior,” passing through the hands of several generations of clergy and laity, helped the figure accrue its aesthetic capital. Empty backgrounds, soft edges, chiaroscuro, elements of portraiture, and changes in the viewing angle were the techniques that added up to culminate in what was perhaps the figure’s most painterly image, dissemi-

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figure 15. Cover of an Easter prayer leaflet, Waldsassen Basilica, undated, after 1989. PfaArch–W, GH. Courtesy of Archiv Katholisches Stadtpfarramt Waldsassen.

nated after the fall of the Iron Curtain (fig. 15). The Jesus on this undated Easter prayer leaflet is turned three quarters toward the viewer and rendered in pastel yellow and tender pink, radiant against the neutral blackand-gray background with a rough texture of dry mortar. The red of his blood, collected just above the loincloth, stands out with particular vibrancy and illuminates the photograph’s center. Of course, the residue of polychrome pigment, described by a pilgrim as the “colored traces of scars,”140 was visible on earlier color photographs as well, in particular on the Easter prayer leaflet from 1974. Yet, on these earlier printings the blood has toned-down, oxidized hues, as if what had once been fluid has

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now turned into dry crust. The luminous red of the most recent image, in contrast, appears hand-colored or even digitally enhanced. A synthesis of various photographic approaches to the figure of the “mutilated Savior” since 1951, this picture confronts the viewer with blood as evidence and “material proof of authenticity.”141 Now that more than forty years have passed since Hampel removed the rump of Jesus’s body from the embers on the Czech side of the Iron Curtain, the red stain authenticates not only the violence of Jesus’s Passion as such, it serves to validate the memory of the rump’s arrival in West Germany and, by extension, the memory of iconoclasm concomitant with the fortification of the Iron Curtain. It is a reminder of the relative ease with which the rise of the Cold War divide has been assimilated into tradition—in particular into the “long tradition of [the Passion] flowing seamlessly between aesthetics and social drama.”142

Coda: The Civilian Bulwark “Worlds,” speculates Morgan in the introduction to his study of visual piety, “collide with one another as well as contain within themselves the contradictions and disjunctures that must be mediated or concealed for the sake of the world’s endurance. Material culture, such as imagery, tends to appear at these sets of disjuncture and contradiction: popular images often serve to mend them or conceal them.”143 Indeed, it would appear that few contexts accommodate Morgan’s observation as readily as the Cold War. There was, indeed, a rift to be bridged, and there were, as we have seen, objects that would have qualified as tools for the labor of repair. From this perspective, the “expelled Madonna” from Mitterfi rmiansreut and the “mutilated Savior” from Waldsassen could have served as “translocative” symbols closing the suture between the two blocs that were also their two homes.144 To an extent, some of Rohrmeier’s letters from the late 1950s breathe just this hope of conciliation. Ideally, Rohrmeier explained to the Archbishop of Regensburg, the mission of the new shrines at the border would be to serve “Catholics from the other side (von drüben)” after the “opening of the border, which would, after all, come about eventually.”145 And yet, the trajectory of the two foundational episodes described in this chapter suggests otherwise. The prayer wall, having sprung up and grown in the wake of the incidents recounted here, cemented the border

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rather than weakening its presence. By recontouring the divide’s outlines with outposts of Catholicism—and that, as the introduction to this chapter has already pointed out, was precisely its accomplishment—the chain of sites redrew the barrier in the West. What may have started out as one of the many proverbial “mental walls” was, by the early 1980s, strikingly material on both sides. As much as the crusading spirit of the 1950s was laced with military references, this was a civilian construction from the outset, predicated on reinforcing the broadly cast gulf between faith and atheism. Such a gulf would have remained a figure of speech had it not been for the covenant—the shared Christian ethos—among border policemen, local believers, clergy, and Sudeten German expellees. These groups were not merely accidental witnesses of defacement. They were, instead, its purposive observers—people who, in Jonathan Crary’s defi nition, saw “within a prescribed set of possibilities” and were “embedded in a system of conventions or limitations” that were political, religious, and visual.146 To be sure, they all watched the military barrier take its early shape. They tried to forecast a future of living next to a very different kind of border than it had once been. Yet, few were content with the impassive role of watchers. Many wished to modulate the barrier’s construction, to adapt the border’s altered presence to their own religious and cultural horizons, hopes, and fears. Instances of iconoclasm on the Czech side provided them with a shared referential apparatus for plotting the intersection between the observed realities and nurtured fantasies. Christian vocabularies and their visual canon buttressed the much-needed solidarities founded on faith. The gradual process of constructing the prayer wall thus did not begin with a clean slate; it was, to paraphrase Eric Hobsbawm, a reinvention of tradition.147 When put to use, such resources ensured that Cold War religion did not remain a rhetorical abstraction deliberated by politicians, theologians, or public intellectuals in the confl ict’s Western capitals. On location, the religious chasm between the blocs was spelled out not only in terms of diffuse “ideas and beliefs.”148 Along the Iron Curtain, faith was anything but a disembodied spirit of anticommunism that enraptured sizeable numbers of Westerners in mysterious ways. It took root in the imagery that entered the West from the East, the present from the past, and aesthetics by way of political circumstance. The resulting qualitative transformations of the images involved invite us to reconsider some assumptions behind the dominant interpre-

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tations of iconoclasm. “When an idol falls,” observes Morgan, “its place does not long remain vacant.” As this quote indicates, thus far, studies of defacement have paid more attention to the iconoclasts’ motivations, their responses to imagery, as well as to the post factum replacements of what once was than to the actual afterlives of the unseated images. This omission is surprising for one specific reason. Among the most prominent causes of defacement, scholars list the often underestimated power of images, a force capable of inspiring awe and fear in equal measure. Destruction, in these accounts, appears as the nemesis of power. It is described as synonymous with an extirpation that would deny objects both their life and potency.149 Accordingly, even the most benevolent forms of iconoclasm result in “banishment and not promotion.”150 And yet the question remains: If the power of religious images is as great as we perceive it to be, how is it possible for it to vanish so completely? Unless an image is ground down to dust, there must be some principle of matter conservation at work to ensure that its ability to impress does not simply dissipate in the flurry of violence. Otherwise, how can we account for the revenants that come to haunt their assaulters well after the fact—and the figures discussed in this chapter certainly qualify as such revenants. Richard H. Davis’s “biographical” approach to religious objects helps to resolve some of the above questions. It presumes that the life of an image is a process of its continued relocation and reinterpretation far beyond the narrow limits of its origins. Humans constantly “steal [devotional images], label them, display them in new settings for new audiences,” Davis contends.151 The meaning of these objects is, consequently, cumulative. It encompasses “all the significances that audiences have given them over time,” reflecting the multiple “fluctuations of status.”152 It thus comes as no surprise that iconoclasm—whether real or, as in the case of Mitterfi rmiansreut’s “expelleed Madonna,” projected—was an act that redefi ned rather than erased the objects discussed here. Instead of abrogating their power, defacement, paradoxically, augmented it. The more the image had suffered, the more powerful it became. Only instances of abuse succeeded in transforming these Sudeten German devotional objects into Christian symbols and aesthetic linchpins of the early Cold War. This transformation occurred along the lines of Bartl’s project of putting small incidents on large mental maps, a concept I introduced at the opening to this chapter.

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There was, however, one significant difference in content. While the photographs of Jesus’s body that were wheeled around the streets of Eger foretold their destruction, depictions of the Waldsassen torso hailed its survival. And yet, not even the simple difference between erasure and survival fully explains the distinction between Bartl’s photograph and those discussed here, let alone the figures they capture. What truly mattered was the modality of survival and the preceding “torture.” In this regard, the lasting traces of abuse in the thick of the emerging Cold War divide paved the way to the success of the Waldsassen torso. Ultimately, they established tragic realism as the dominant tone for subsequent border narratives. Aesthetic re-envisioning was another substantial determinant of these narratives’ successes or failures. “What is not art,” proponents of twentieth-century iconoclasm have been known to claim, “cannot be aesthetically transformed.”153 In contrast to such claims, the two images discussed here suggest that to re-embed religious images in the wake of their defacement, clergy, believers, and photographers freely borrowed from the diffuse pool of visual vocabularies attached to mainstream artistic practices. Could these vocabularies, which included iconographies, compositional typologies, and representational techniques, successfully raise the status of these images or not? The answer to this question became a litmus test for identifying the icon curtain’s fi rst icons. In the end, human stories of border crossings—real-life successes or tragedies documented by the hundreds in the fi les of the BBP—were soon forgotten. In contrast, the stories of the devotional images that had made their way from the East into the West have lived on. Given Schroubek’s delimited chronology of expellee pilgrimages, this is little short of paradoxical. Concluding his manuscript in 1968, the ethnographer put a date on the twilight of the rituals that both he and Karasek-Langer deemed integral for the reshuffl ing of West Germany’s confessional makeup. As early as 1955, claimed Schroubek, expellee pilgrimages saw the beginnings of their attrition, so much so that they were “practically dead” by the time he published his study.154 And yet the foundations of the fi rst borderland chapels, as we will learn in chapter 4, were laid as late as 1953. The prayer wall was yet to coalesce. Far from withering away in the mid-1950s, some of these sites would be developed into larger architectural complexes only in the 1960s and 1970s. Not restricted to worship, they would evolve into environments for steering the visual experience

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of the borderlands. Following in the steps taken earlier at Mitterfi rmiansreut and Waldsassen, these structures would adapt physical vision to the conventions of Western image-making since the Renaissance. Their story, however, is the stuff of the following chapters. But fi rst we look at travel.

Chapter Three

Infrastructure Civilian Border Travel and Travelogues Putting “Border” and “Land” Back Together

D

espite its seasonal glories, touring the southern ranges of the Bavarian Forest in the fall of 1949 left Hugo Geiger, then secretary of the Bavarian Ministry of Economics, despondent. His itinerary included few of the usual hinterland pastimes for which the area was known at that time of year—mushroom hunting, hiking, or scouting out the landmarks celebrated in Adalbert Stifter’s works. Yet, having missed out on these pastimes was not the cause of Geiger’s low spirits. The purpose of his journey left little room for levity. His was a borderland trip (Grenzlandreise, or Grenzlandfahrt), a form of Cold War travel that would eventually bring about the secular infrastructure for the prayer wall. This infrastructure was of two sorts. There were the logistics of travel, including the all-important roads, accommodations, and eateries one encountered on the road. But there was also the written record: travelers’ accounts of the routes they had taken, their impressions of the places they had been, and the recommendations they shared with others. Beyond the older ski trails and climatic resorts, it was the growing popularity of such borderland trips that would fully integrate such small towns and villages as Waldsassen and Mitterfi rmiansreut into the prayer wall. Only a trip that encompassed both the border and the forest would allow visitors to visualize the consequences of the new overlap between these two entities. Traveling along the divide, rather than staying in one location, was the only way to affi rm the prayer wall as a burgeoning continuum. And writing about one’s travels would serve to perpetuate such journeys over sev-

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eral decades. In this chapter, I will address the development of the border infrastructure after 1951 and its popularization in print. That such an infrastructure relied on established patterns of forest travel may well have been specific to the Czechoslovak–West German border. But the actual practice of the borderland trip had historical antecedents. Already prior to World War I and during the interwar period, German nationalists were politicizing travel to their nation’s eastern margins by conducting “excursions” to those regions, designed “to convey the reality of the border,” bloody and violent.1 In their published guidebooks, they separated the residents there into Germans and nonGermans. Finally, they sought to highlight the purity of the surrounding “German forest.” 2 For them, borders were not just cultural contact zones or commercial junctions, but areas where activism acquired its greatest performative potential. The new postwar order, mapped by the Yalta and Potsdam agreements in 1945, did nothing to alter the lineage of these and similar practices. Instead, the legacy of earlier borderland tourism received a new lease on life in the area to the west of the Iron Curtain. In the following pages, I will outline the impact of nineteenth-century Germanophone fiction on travel to the Bohemian Forest and adjacent areas. I will then characterize the thematic and structural sweep of mid- to late-twentiethcentury borderland reporting. For context, I will trace the Czechoslovak– West German border as a destination significant for the “travel wave” of the 1950s. 3 A categorization of Cold War–era participants in such borderland trips will demonstrate that Sudeten Germans were the most consistent and prolific reporters from the Iron Curtain. After acquainting readers with the cultural geography encompassed during these journeys, my focus will shift to the borderland reports—travelogues that addressed Cold War exigencies. Such writings served two purposes. On the one hand, they sought to identify the borderlands as a single humanecological entity, despite the fragmentation. On the other hand, they cultivated a new awareness of the cleft landscape. While recent research on the inter-German partition suggests that relatively few sources document the experiences of ordinary travelers to the Iron Curtain, the Sudeten German narratives presented here belie that impression. Indeed, these texts chronicle even the most routine civilian explorations of the Cold War barrier well into the late 1980s.4 Of course, journeys to the Cold War borderlands were not merely derivative. The barrier’s appearance, purpose, and symbolic significance

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called for a new intensity of ideological and emotional investment. Yet, their debt to the past is too significant to overlook. Studies of the physical environment at the Iron Curtain have identified some isolated correspondences between the physical structures of the Cold War era and their World War II precursors. Among these, the Thuringian Tower (Thüringer Warte), constructed by Hitler’s military and rebuilt on the West German side in 1963 to promote visitor traffic there, is a prime example. 5 My own analysis seeks to broaden the spectrum of such correspondences, chronologically as well as methodologically. First, I argue that the aforementioned connections go much further back than World War II, echoing such sources as the region’s folk sagas, nineteenth-century realist novellas, and early tourist guidebooks, all artifacts that had wide distribution. Second, in postwar Central Europe, interest in these traditions was rekindled well before the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961—a common reference point for the increase in Westerners’ visits to the Iron Curtain’s inter-German segment—and this interest did not subsided until the mid-1990s. And fi nally, these associations going back in time were also meaningful in space, connecting specific locations along the border as well. I will begin with an exploration of how civilians continued to transform the barrier between Bavaria and Bohemia in the 1950s. Travel was integral to these changes, and Sudeten German expellees, the newly mobile beneficiaries of the German economic miracle,6 were the most qualified custodians of the links between the forested border “then” and “now.” Although they were not the only visitors to the barrier, they were the only organized group to have extensively engaged, for more than a century, with the land that stretched along both sides of the would-be Cold War border. If appreciation of the landscape is “a matter of familiarity,” few were more familiar with the area or more attuned to the history of its political, literary, and pictorial representation than the active members of this border contingent.7 It is small wonder, then, that to them, genealogy mattered a great deal. But what do we gain from studying it? Most significantly, it invites us to put down the national lens that restricts our understanding of the Iron Curtain to a phenomenon that divided a single country—Germany. To be sure, borderland tourism along the inter-German rift did largely focus on German concerns. Trip planners sought “to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to the Germans on the other side of the fence, to express a desire for German unification on West German terms or,

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in later years, at least to uphold a sense of the ‘unity of the German nation.’”8 To a considerable extent, comparable trips to the south of Hof in northern Bavaria, from where the Czechoslovak–West German border extended toward Passau, shared this focus. But the preoccupation with all things German did not constitute their horizon, and recuperating national unity was not their sole goal. Participants in these journeys spoke of the border as a place where the East touched the West, as their routes, they realized, brushed against “the hinge of the Occident,” rather than Germany alone.9 They were intent on gauging the full significance of this circumstance fi rsthand. And so, their trips to the Czechoslovak–West German border frequently brought up issues that transcended the constraints and concerns of the fractured nation. Rather than merely inviting the question of what the Cold War meant for Germans—Easterners, Westerners, and the recent expellees from the former eastern territories and the Sudetenland— such journeys also compelled travelers to wonder about the Cold War writ large. It seemed a particularly perplexing kind of confl ict. Was it a “long peace,” a “permanent and actively perpetuated ‘non-peace,’” or a flat-out war?10 Were these or similar terms mutually exclusive? And how could one fi nd out? For thousands of visitors to the Czechoslovak– West German border, the intermeshing between Central Europe’s picturesque forests and the military fence paved a path to deliberating the new confl ict’s particulars in situ. This process would have been incomplete had it been confi ned to experience alone. Only when travelers returned from their borderland trips did they begin to understand that leisurely pastimes at the border and the gravity of Europe’s division did not need to be mutually exclusive. While travel literature, as Paul Fussell once pointed out, authenticates itself by references to the real, it always contains more than the “gross physicalities” of the visited places.11 This was certainly the case in the accounts considered here. Disseminated in the homeland leaflets, travelers’ poetry and especially travelogues became fruitful ground for manipulating the seeming binaries—untouched wilderness and man-made border fortifications, war and peace, nature and culture—into unities. Describing their journeys and committing them to specific generic form helped West German civilians grapple—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—with the persistent question of how one era could be experienced as war and peace at the same time. How could the symbols of “war, captivity, and unfreedom” coexist with what they described as the

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“magnificent woods”?12 How could the same border leave “an almost peaceful impression” and also be a paragon of horror (Grauen)?13 It was thus only appropriate that such questions should be articulated at one of the era’s key locations. As scholars have shown, the Iron Curtain, the potential epicenter of a showdown between East and West, represented both a “military stalemate” and a “delicate instrument of world peace.”14 It is remembered as a signifier of confl ict as much as of détente. And already its contemporaries sensed this ambivalence and struggled to accommodate it. Travelers’ accounts, therefore, sought to reflect that contradictory experience, and searched for a narrative form that would synthesize these disjointed impressions. In contrast to visitors to the inter-German border, who were often disappointed to see that “nothing at all [was] going on,”15 their counterparts at the barrier between Czechoslovakia and West Germany juxtaposed this border’s “danger and ugliness” with its landscape’s peacefulness.16

The Adalbert Stifter Effect We shall now turn to a brief survey of the literary origins of travel to the area, since this literature was influential enough to become the benchmark for Cold War–era texts. Indeed, in the nineteenth century adventures in Central Europe’s “terra incognita” began on the written page. In all likelihood, the popularity of these earlier written prototypes helped in the development of the twentieth-century travelogues. Among the most important early literary plots was one familiar to and beloved among all those with a connection to the Bohemian Forest—and especially its former Sudeten German residents, the so-called Böhmerwäldler. In Adalbert Stifter’s 1841 novella High Forest (Der Hochwald), those who gazed at the area’s landscape would see concurrent, if confl icting, images of war and peace, it providing a precedent for travel accounts in the Cold War era. Set along the southernmost edges of the Bohemian Forest during the Thirty Years War, the story hinged on taunting the protagonists, sisters Johanna and Clarissa, who fled into the woods to avoid the war and passed their time there looking back at their home from afar, with the very same tension that later affl icted Cold War–era travelers as they stood at the border. As Stifter wrote, while the sisters’ home, a “beloved little cube on the edge of the forest,” appeared to be unscathed to the younger girl, who viewed it with her naked eye,

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the elder sister, looking through a telescope, saw the same cube as a ruin, with “no roof and . . . strange black stains” all over its walls.17 A very similar interplay of visual pleasure and the anticipation of tragedy—the double exposure—dictated the narrative dynamic of mid-twentieth- century travel writings from the Iron Curtain.18 Sepp Skalitzky, for example, went so far as to turn this dyad into the backdrop of his story “The Old Cradle,” published in 1961. Its protagonist, a young Sudeten German fatherto-be lives in an increasingly more affluent West Germany, yet he is unable to afford a baby stroller for his expected child. So one night, he secretly crosses the border into his home village in order to fetch a cradle. Much of the story telescopes on his impressions as he approaches his destination, described initially as “unperturbed and unscathed,” then as sunlit yet motionless, and fi nally as “uncanny and desolate”: “What had appeared unscathed from a distance now showed the traveler its brutally disfigured face.”19 As we shall see, Skalitzky’s character was not alone in grappling with the starkly contrasting views from nearby and from afar. Of course, Stifter’s influence was not merely intrinsic to his text. It was its positive reception by both nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers that allowed it to be eventually reflected in Cold War travel narratives. Thanks to the author’s obsession with topographic accuracy and visual detail, his fiction easily entered into the reality of the road trip of the modern era, to be read, as Walter Benjamin explained, “at rest stops after a hike, while processing impressions.” 20 The descriptive allure of Stifter’s works converted his readers into travelers early on. After High Forest appeared as a monograph in 1852, it promptly became a guidebook in the hands of the author’s devotees. The resonance was so potent that “the Stifter region around Dreisessel and near Plöckenstein”—the peaks that served as the text’s backdrop—became the area’s fi rst tourist attractions, 21 from where textual topographies could be retraced in real life. The appeal of these landmarks had hardly diminished a century later. Then, it was the Iron Curtain that traversed the two summits, leaving their eastern and western slopes on the opposite sides. And although Hannah Arendt, in her glowing review of Stifter’s fi rst English translation, postulated that “one knows the gardens and rocks and mountains and rivers of Stifter’s novels even if one has never seen the Bohemian forest,” his postwar readers ventured to disagree. 22 For them, the author’s literary realism was inalienable from the physical lay of the land. While few doubted his realist sleight of pen, for most, seeing was still

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believing as proof of the accuracy of Stifter’s texts. One early postwar Beadeker guidebook to motorized travel around Bavaria’s east often invoked Stifter, in the assumption that tourists would be familiar with his oeuvre. 23 For decades, Stifter’s texts remained the lens for the area’s reception. August Sieghardt, West Germany’s prolific guidebook author and a traveler with fi fty years of borderland experience, confessed to having read Stifter’s words countless times. “High Forest,” he told his readers in 1959, “belonged to my personal bible and, in my eyes, still possesses this quality.” 24 Being able to identify the novella’s “most important localities” had a special importance for Sudeten Germans, and in 1955 one expellee periodical published a questionnaire, “Do You Know Your Heimat?,” that asked its readers to do just that. 25 Knowing and recalling Stifter’s text was tantamount to knowing and recalling the area’s geography. And knowledge and memory, in turn, formed the foundation of the evolving Iron Curtain narratives. Borderland trips to the mountains’ accessible western slopes served as refreshers of sorts. Travelers attempted, on the one hand, to rehearse a Stifterian triumph of timeless nature over the temporally conditioned society. On the other hand, they were made painfully aware of the disconnect between the writer’s nineteenth-century landscapes and the changing geography of the divided land a hundred years later. The narratives of these journeys constituted a negotiation between these two contrasting viewpoints. The term “narrative” serves to characterize the sources I examine in this chapter, and it also furthers a specific methodological goal. The premise that “we organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative”—“a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery”—is several decades old. 26 And yet, thus far, studies of the Iron Curtain have by and large privileged discourse (tantamount to the fabula or content) and neglected narrative (i.e., the sujet or form). This tendency continues to limit our “insight into the psychological, aesthetic, or moral appeal of different forms of discourse” about the physical rift between East and West. 27 My methodological approach in this chapter, therefore, attempts to redress this asymmetry. What matters to me is not only what travelers penned upon returning home, but also how they chose to compose these reminiscences. To judge by the volume of ink spilled, the Iron Curtain was a barrier not just awe-inspiring, but also inspiring in the most literal sense. This

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inspiration was a long time in coming. Whereas early Cold War travelers by and large got around on their own, after the mid-1950s an increasing number of predeparture workshops and lectures began to set the journeys’ emotional valence for groups. Even those who did not attend one of these events (and thousands never did) had ample opportunity to learn about their goals and outcomes, published in homeland leaflets and trade journals for expellee educators. Two such publications, Deutsche Ostkunde: West-ostdeutsche Blätter für Erziehung und Unterricht and Sudetendeutscher Erzieherbrief, regularly reprinted lesson plans and accounts of the past successes and shortcomings. Such contributions were the livelihood of Ostkunde, or “Eastern European Studies,” a postwar school curriculum that combined elements of geography, Nazi-era and postwar Ostforschung, and anticommunist propaganda. Line by line, the Cold War pedagogues and ideologues charged with teaching young and old disbursed the most current “sagas and fears.” 28 The latter both conditioned the visitors-to-be for an experience of “inhumanity” and “senselessness,” and supplied them with an arsenal of ready-made metaphors and preconceived mental images of rupture and death. 29 Tours for youth groups, the authors recommended, ought to begin at the inter-German border, where the initially boisterous participants, to their chaperones’ relief, would quickly get “ever more quiet and depressed.”30 Certainly, neither the dismal mood that underpinned such preludes nor their cookie-cutter idiom qualified as particularly inspirational. It was thus up to each traveler to reconcile the disseminated clichés with what he or she saw or chose to see in situ. Precisely the contradictions that arose from such encounters counted among the reasons that prompted people to write. The narratives examined here emerged from an attempted synthesis of two clashing opposites: the travelers’ typically tragic expectations and the astonishment that at least some of them felt at the strangely peaceful appearance of the forest. These more or less successful unions eventually trickled down to a relatively stable corpus of entirely overlooked narratives that had four decades to crystallize and develop. Frequently based on impressions of both the Czechoslovak–West German and inter-German borders, these texts were part and parcel of the reshuffl ing of genres and forms that constituted a progressively more “democratic” scope of travel writing in the wake of World War II. 31 Albeit with their own, delimited, audience in mind, they fed off the rising popularity of travel literature in the twentieth century’s second half. Before moving on to a close reading and dis-

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cussion of specific examples, let us fi rst make acquaintance with the revival of this narrative form in the early 1950s and then revisit the Cold War context of the journeys that called such writings into being.

The Beginnings of Cold War Borderland Reportage At stake was not just any textual form. A particular kind of reportage, mentioned but not dissected in Elizabeth Harvey’s work on activism at Germany’s Weimar-era borders, gained currency among those who skimmed West Germany’s southwestern limit. 32 Just as the divide was being consolidated, the civilian borderland report, or Grenzlandbericht, found its way into periodicals. In retrospect, the most widely disseminated and exhaustive accounts were Anglophone in origin. Some may remember that in the early 1980s, a well-known British journalist Anthony Bailey had followed the entire length of the Iron Curtain from the West German town of Lübeck to the Italian city of Trieste, publishing installments of his chronicle in The New Yorker as he went along. Yet, the genre was not always as ambitious as to replicate Churchill’s coordinates of the Iron Curtain verbatim, as Bailey did when he collated his notes into a book, Along the Edge of the Forest: An Iron Curtain Journey (1983). Few had the time, the means, or the ability to produce such a book-length survey. Moreover, the borderland report did not take more than thirty years to come into its own. Nor did it belong to professionals alone: envisioning Cold War scenarios, to quote Tracy C. Davis, “did not require an artistic career.”33 By the early 1950s, writing about outings to the border’s environs had already taken off among amateurs, especially expellee newcomers. Along the Czechoslovak–West German divide, Sudeten German expellees led the pen-bearing vanguard. Eager to map the experience of moving along the Iron Curtain for their peers who could not join them, they sent off their writings, many anonymous, to homeland leaflets large and small. For the numerous unnamed authors, reporting was a matter of substance, not vanity. Defi ning the substance, however, proved trickier. What was more authentic: to attempt an objective description of the Bavarian countryside, the Iron Curtain, the no man’s land, and the landmarks behind it, or, on the contrary, to demonstrate one’s emotional investment in the landscape? Most reports tried to strike a balance between both these goals, arguing that to write as a tourist did not mean

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renouncing “the claims to expertise” of professional correspondents. 34 They made no secret of the extent to which their background determined their bias, as bias, too, possessed its own legitimating force. 35 Intended as “factual fiction,” the borderland report, from one to three pages in length, borrowed from other genres and was situated between “subjective inquiry” and “objective documentation.”36 Its chronological flow was at home in the travelogue tradition, while its tone and close attention to data came by way of border police notes. Border policemen, provincial or federal, frequently accompanied individuals or groups at the border site. Civilians appear to have been so impressed with the cool factuality of their more seasoned escorts that they sought to emulate it, at least in part. Thus, most reports considered here painstakingly listed the number of participants, the places visited in the West, the visible landmarks in the East, the border’s fortifications, the length of the route, the day and time, and the distance between places of residence and the border. Yet, to engage the reader, they also delivered much more than just a roster of facts. An adaptation of the long-standing tradition of travel notes to Cold War topographies, the hybrid Grenzlandbericht was an important vehicle for producing and reproducing knowledge about this key Cold War symbol. First and foremost, it reassured its readers that the Iron Curtain was really there, providing examples of what it could be like to stand, walk, or drive in its vicinity. As one amateur reporter wrote in the 1980s, trips and their accounts added “practical experience to the theoretical knowledge that political borders exist.”37 This knowledge was not confi ned to technical details: the returning travelers took this factual data and attempted to make sense of the contrast between the signifiers of war and peace. Their reports struggled to reconcile “border” and “nature,” as much as to strike a balance between objectivity and subjectivity. To advance these two goals, the fledgling authors picked up on the descriptive tradition of European travel writing. They pared down the more-extensive scope of the so-called “relation,” the report’s distant cousin, to a combination of “a chronological narrative of movements . . . with geographic . . . observations.”38 Ostensibly, the focus was on the landscape’s properties and changes, observed and interpreted from the vantage point of those who claimed to know the “borderland” as it once had been but who now had trouble keeping up with its transformation into a Cold War “border.” The task of bridging this gap meant that, in the travelogue tradition,

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the borderland report reflected a quest of sorts. 39 The objective was to reestablish a direct relationship between the traveler’s interior and his or her surroundings. Such features of travel literature as character development or Bildungsroman-like self-knowledge make an appearance only if they are somehow connected to the environmental changes.40 Almost all interior processes, be they perceptions, emotions, or memories, originate in the landscape’s transformation into a border between the blocs. It often seems as if the travelers’ inner world would have remained inaccessible to the readers had the border not been there to elicit their response. The “inhumane” divide strangely humanized its visitors as it made them swell up with feelings and reminiscences. The question that these subjects faced was whether to accept and reinforce the landscape’s changes, or to question or even attempt to undo them. The means at their disposal was the narrative. Sudeten Germans used it, depending on each individual case, either to relinquish or to reinstate their temporarily suspended status as borderland experts. The border’s acceptance, from their perspective, amounted to acknowledging the divide’s growing complexity rather than to somatizing it as a “mental wall.” Its rejection, on the other hand, stood not only for the nationalist aspirations to all-German unity but also for a rather selfish desire to recuperate the landscape as it had once been in order to reclaim authority over it. Border reports traded in the expellees’ own version of “border gnosis”—which is to say, such texts attempted to prove that their authors’ “differential forms of knowledge,” rooted in earlier borderland practices, had a continued relevance to the new Cold War order in Central Europe.41 It is hardly surprising that on site, the production of knowledge was rooted in perception. The ensuing writings, too, were devoted almost entirely to what travelers could or could not see, hear, or even smell, rather than to what occurred around them. Events took a back seat. The borderland reports considered here marginalized the kinds of incidents that we associate with the Iron Curtain. These narratives rarely, if ever, regaled their readers with thrilling stories of “fantastic” smuggling schemes, daring escapes, or the agony of death, even if such things had taken place in the proximate past.42 Although travel texts often serve as compensatory mechanisms that deliver “the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals” to people whose lives lack drama, the writings of Sudeten German travelers withheld any such promise.43 If anything, center stage belonged to casualties of the everyday kind—to the downfall of

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“culture” on the divide’s eastern side that had been so meticulously pictured by Ernst Bartl. Yet, to write about the saddening transformations, the reports suggested, did not mean to succumb to pessimism entirely. In these texts, “the still beautiful forests” of the early Cold War did not disappear into thin air, but gave way, by the late 1980s, to a preternatural if uncanny wilderness. The authors volunteered to close such gaps with projections, reminiscences, and real-life impressions of a landscape that, in their minds, did not readily lend itself to being a tragic backdrop.44 Foreshadowing such generic developments, the travels of Secretary Geiger in 1949, described at the beginning of this chapter, produced one of the earliest and most systematic borderland reports to be disseminated in the newly divided Germany. The text did not address Germany’s division as such; it emphasized, instead, the significance of the Iron Curtain’s southward expanse. As Geiger’s colleagues at the Bavarian State Planning Board edited, expanded, and prepared his report for publication, they set out to depict the Cold War overlap between the legendary “German forest” and the precipitating mid-Continental divide—and that overlap would become the hallmark of all subsequent travel writing about the border. The Economic and Social Situation in the Bavarian and Bohemian Forests after World War II drew attention to Europe’s division as a new strain on the social and natural order on the Continent in general and on the mid-Continental forests in particular.45 It depicted the permutation of an old border into a new threat, not merely to economic infrastructure but also to the fragile unity of humans and the natural environment. It posited that the Cold War had put the pivotal premise of twentiethcentury Germanophone geography on trial.46 To quote a Sudeten German study of the Bohemian Forest, the perfect unison of the natural landscape (Naturlandschaft), independent of human activity, and the cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft), where cultural willpower (Kulturwille) and labor (Arbeitskraft) could unfold, was about to crumble in the face of the East-West standoff.47 The confl ict’s borderland as a holistic environmental entity, it seemed, teetered on the verge of breaking down into the man-made border as one component and the natural land as another. To prevent or at least postpone this disintegration became yet another task of this and subsequent borderland reports. This labor was largely imaginative, although some accounts, as the story of Europe’s Center will attest, related to the area’s physical topography. If in the inter-German

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context “politically induced border tourism . . . transmuted into leisureoriented borderland tourism” by the early 1980s, concerns with maintaining the unity of border and land had shaped travel writing about the Czech–Bavarian border since the late 1940s.48 Rather than simply pledging to renew “nationalist commitment,” such texts, as their name suggests, attempted to put border and land back together.49 To integrate vignettes of war/border with those of peace/nature was one of the writers’ prime challenges en route to this goal. As we shall see, the report on Geiger’s trip faced such a challenge early on. But fi rst it outlined the scope of the imminent breakdown. Particularly notable was the mention of two forests, rather than just one. If Geiger had neither set foot on the Bohemian side nor was in charge of reporting on what had transpired on the land in communist Czechoslovakia, what made him refer to that stretch of land? His inclusion of the Bohemian Forest could certainly strike “some readers” as an “odd, even superfluous” lapse, as Sieghardt pointed out a decade later: “Indeed, the Bohemian Forest lies on the other side of the Iron Curtain; crossing over from the Bavarian [side], as we know, is not only strictly forbidden by the Czechs but also life-threatening. Hardly anyone would feel an appetite for such an adventure.” So why, Sieghardt wondered, did accounts such as Geiger’s and his own include these unreachable slopes? Because, he argued, “until spring 1945, hikes and trips around the Bavarian Forest habitually veered” into the “Bohemian border forest.”50 The physical memory of such detours must have informed Geiger’s report as well. On the one hand, the brochure’s title bore traces of the long-standing ambivalence about the two forests and testified to the reluctance to cast their limits in stone, let alone rim them with metal wire. On the other hand, the report was a harbinger of just such an impending separation. It communicated the budding awareness that the forests’ division along the Cold War border was now unmistakable and their distinct names, for once, seemed justified. How the forest was portrayed in the text changed accordingly. At the center of attention stood not the indeterminate expanse of wilderness that Isaac Pocock had described. On the contrary, the emphasis was on the sharp outlines to which this wilderness had to submit now that the Cold War order clashed with the Stifterian law of nature (Naturgesetz), which I will cover in chapter 4. At stake, as follows from the report’s publication in November 1949—only six months after the proclamation of the Federal Republic—were the economic and environmental defi-

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cits that arose from these strictly enforced limits. In twenty-four pages the report brought home “to Bavaria and [other West German] provinces” that what had been a nature preserve meandering across an international boundary was now the West’s “culturally embattled and politically endangered” edge. And a “clear picture of [its] social and economic need” was, in the authors’ opinion, a decisive fi rst step to bolstering the troubled area. 51 Like numerous borderland reports that followed, Geiger’s addressed a variety of interrelated themes, placing special emphasis on agriculture, forestry, and transportation. Unadorned, factual statements outlined the region’s difficult situation, described its shortcomings, and made suggestions for future improvement. The section on the “Advancement of Tourism,” however, stood out against the otherwise cut-and-dried tone of the text. Its tenor and vocabulary recalled the prose of tourist guidebooks and Stifter’s dense descriptions of nature blended stylistically to make an imaginative remedy for the collapse of the landscape’s unity. Anticipating the Heimat revival of the 1950s, Geiger unexpectedly waxed romantic about the “beauty of the landscape.” The report’s opening lines recommended “the gentle highland hills of the Upper Palatine and Bohemian Forest” and “the steeply rising Bavarian Forest with its dark mountain lakes and preternaturally romantic woods” as ideal destinations. “Those in search of rest will, fi rst and foremost, fi nd peace (Ruhe) here, and most beautiful hikes in glorious forests await nature lovers.”52 This last sentence did not merely round off a narrative digression, characteristic of some of the other borderland reports considered in this chapter. It actually marked a departure from the Schillerian legacy of depicting this part of Europe as a tempestuous and opaque woodland. But even more so, its wording clashed with the air of tense watchfulness that descriptions of the Iron Curtain commonly call to mind. Looking for, let alone fi nding, peace of any sort at the frontline of the Cold War surely was a provocative promotional pitch. And yet, as we will see, it was precisely the kind of paradox that proponents and practitioners of tourism in the area had to negotiate throughout the Cold War. Geiger and his colleagues, it turns out, were in good company. Sieghardt promised a similar “oasis of peace” (Ruhe) in one of the earliest postwar guidebooks to the culture and geography of the Bavarian Forest, reprinted in 1962, 1974, and 1983. 53 Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, several other popular coffee table books joined in the chorus to advertise the “haven of peace” to customers in Germany as well

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as abroad. The fact that the border with Czechoslovakia runs directly through these “primeval-like forests,” some authors assured, need not discourage “those who seek relaxation.” “Bronzed visitors,” they gushed, “are fascinated by the Bavarian Forest time and again. . . . The colorful splendor of the forests makes every day a special experience.”54 A mirror of the tension between war and peace, tourism, to paraphrase Pieter Judson, continued to be less about the places themselves than about changing the ways in which visitors saw them. 55 “Dark tourism,” to be sure, reaped grim success along the interGerman section of the Iron Curtain. Yet, along the divide’s southwestern section, a place “worth stopping by, but hardly conveying the menace of the Iron Curtain,” darkness frequently failed, and idyllic views stepped in its stead. Here, Ruhe (i.e., calm) and Friede (i.e., the opposite of war) became near-identical doubles. Initially, the sense of lull caught up with travelers not solely because “the Iron Curtain’s fortifications were not yet commensurate with its growing Cold War importance.”56 It derived from nature’s fickle serenity that saturated the mid-nineteenth-century prose of such writers as Stifter or Maximilian Schmidt (1832–1919), and propelled that long century’s tourist culture around the area. As a result, not all those who stood at the border between Czechoslovakia and West Germany were in the grip of the tragic pitch. For travelers with writing ambitions, the conundrum of the double exposure—peaceful vistas cloaking political circumstances widely described as tragic—invited a slew of questions. How could one draw attention to the borderland’s urgency without detracting from the landscape’s beauty, both a literary-cultural and, more recently, economic staple? Conversely, should one—and how—dramatize Cold War tensions, often enough inconveniently concealed under the thick cover of spruce branches? These questions occupied not only the journeying Sudeten Germans. They were also on the minds of those who welcomed them at the border. Like Geiger’s colleagues, generations of BBP officers, town administrators, and local and expellee enthusiasts understood that only a combination of recreation in the storied forests and the novelty of having these woods be the new Cold War frontier could help draw visitors and put the economically shaken area back on its feet. The ability to marry opposites, pack pleasure and pain into a single visit, and entwine past and present set them apart from their peers at the inter-German border—a largely new structure—who had trouble reconciling relaxation with the “dangers of the Iron Curtain.”57 Along the line between Bohe-

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mia and Bavaria, the sense of calm was pervasive enough to leave visitors little choice but to engage with the contrast between tragic expectations and actual impressions. The region’s increasing visibility on West Germany’s cultural map suggested that such an engagement was all the more imperative. Stifter’s Bohemian Forest novellas made a comeback when the postwar Federal Republic rediscovered the author—until then, he had been seen “neither as a German classic nor as an Austrian national poet.”58 To help put such doubts to rest, Sudeten Germans supported a twelve-year-long process of Stifter’s symbolic canonization. Enshrined in one of the most significant historic monuments—Leo von Klenze’s neoclassical Walhalla on the Danube—the author and “protector of Christian Europe” joined the pantheon of the Germanic greats in 1954. 59 In parallel to Stifter’s promotions, the nationalist German Bohemian Forest League (Böhmerwaldbund), founded in 1884 and revived after 1949, continued to popularize the landscape in its seminal guidebook, reprinted in regular intervals since 1888.60 In addition, German-speaking armchair travelers could now access the forest’s imaginative geography by way of Alfred Kubin’s expressionist print series Fantasies in the Bohemian Forest (Phantasien im Böhmerwald), completed and published in 1951. Yet only those who approached the actual border could recount what happened when fantasies crossed paths with visible realities—when the tragic pitch verged on faltering. It would be impossible to understand the outcome without knowing more about the visitors and the physical space where they moved and embedded their narratives. Each merits an overview before we move on to their actual writings.

The Iron Curtain as a Destination Since there was no universal prescription for how to reconnoiter the Iron Curtain, in the fi rst decade of the Cold War movement on the ground took several forms. The divide was not hermetic, so crossing to the other side was the most obvious. In that fi rst decade, along the Czechoslovak– West German segment the monthly head count of those who passed through ranged between 500 to 1,400 in 1951, to nearly 10,000 by 1957.61 Crossing points were limited to a relatively few designated areas, especially Schirnding–Eger, Wildenau–Asch/Aš, and Hundsbach–Wies—the latter the place where Paul Hampel discovered “the mutilated Savior.”

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East-bound crossers included members of artist collectives; diplomats; businessmen from countries ranging from France to Turkey; sportsmen and women and their fans en route to international competitions known as Spartakiads; tourists curious about the Eastern Bloc; Bohemian resort devotees; and attendees of various congresses and trade shows.62 Westbound traffic, as one might expect, was made up of similar groups. But no roster of border-crossers would be complete without the thousands who crossed the border illegally by avoiding the official checkpoints altogether. In the early 1950s, each month, between five and fi fty illegal crossers—seasonal laborers, economic migrants, dissidents, or Eastern Bloc refugees who sought to join their families in the West—risked their lives to reach the western side of the Iron Curtain. A surprisingly large number of Westerners, between two and twenty each month, fled eastward. Dubbed “deranged” by puzzled BBP officials, this contingent included unhappy West German spouses escaping family confl icts; nostalgic German expellees desperate to fi nd their way back to the former homes; disillusioned Czechoslovak refugees returning under the amnesty law of 1956; as well as timber smugglers, spies, Communist sympathizers, and simply adventurers in search of a new start.63 As we have seen, there was also a new type of visitor—the tourist who was interested in the border itself. Instead of crossing, these travelers moved along the divide to document its course and the changes to it year after year. Thanks to them, the Iron Curtain became a significant destination for the German “travel wave” of the 1950s. For some, the border transformed from an obstacle into a potential spectacle, so that a focus on the border’s apparatus entirely supplanted the “cross-cultural encounter” commonly given as a reason to travel. Others, in contrast, resisted the single-minded sightseeing culture and conceived of the border tour as “balancing pleasure and purpose.”64 Motivations, however, varied greatly. Rather than keep track of all those who came to the border with no intention of crossing, the BBP only recorded visitors from the most numerically significant categories. Among these were politicians; middle-class German vacationers; the international sponsors of Radio Free Europe (RFE, a US-fi nanced and Munich-based radio broadcaster across the Iron Curtain); and, fi nally, Sudeten Germans. By surveying each of these groups we can begin to grasp the context in which the borderland report took root. When they came to the border to get a sense of the barrier’s strategic changes and acquaint themselves with Eastern Bloc refugee issues on

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site, US diplomats and military officers, delegations of Bavarian, West German, or European politicians, as well as journalists generally traveled in groups of ten to thirty people.65 In 1954, the popular expellee periodical Volksbote noted that West German President Theodor Heuss toured the divided railway station at Bayerisch Eisenstein, “shak[ing] his head at the desert of the Sudeten German landscape that spead ahead of him.” The reporter’s dramatic vocabulary befitted the official visit: “Tall watchtowers soar over mountaintops on the Sudeten German horizon, and even the railway station on the Czech side is wrapped in scaffolding from where, a stone’s throw away, a sentry glares over through binoculars.”66 Still, not all visitors to the border were as conscious of the supposed drama all around them. In the latter category were West German vacationers, who in the summertime descended upon the Bavarian Forest with very different plans in mind. Most arrived by car to enjoy the still-inexpensive climatic resorts located in the mountainous areas around the tall peaks Osser, Rachel, or Arber. To track their overnight stays, the BBP regularly reviewed visitor books in guest houses, private pensions, and hostels, checking unfamiliar names “according to protocol.”67 Such careful practices reflected one of the border officers’ primary concerns: the state of the region’s economy, a particular weakness that had been highlighted in Geiger’s report. Because the winter months were traditionally less attractive—few border policemen, let alone civilian skiers, ventured out into the subzero temperatures—the BBP welcomed the arrival of spring with considerable enthusiasm. Yet the greening hills also called for greater watchfulness. Their scrupulous head counts thus tied into their second concern: security. Hopes for the growth of tourism, “the livelihood of the local population,” soon appeared to pay off.68 Founded in 1948, the Official Bavarian Travel Bureau (Amtliches Bayerisches Reisebüro) was one of the fi rst postwar agencies of its kind. Along with employees of the East Bavarian Tourist Agency (Fremdenverkehrsverband Ostbayern), in operation since 1949, its representatives were determined not to let pension beds gather dust. Already in the winter of 1948–49, they advertised as many as nineteen destinations all over Bavaria.69 Of course, compared to the Alps or to large urban centers, the province’s eastern rim was not the top magnet for West Germans with cash to spare. Yet even there, guest beds did not take long to fi ll once Bavarian tourism got on its speedy path to recovery. Southern “vacation country” appealed especially to West Ber-

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liners in search of quiet and affordable areas.70 In 1952, when 85 percent of all German vacations were still of the domestic variety, the border’s northern area around Furth im Wald reported a sizeable influx of visitors. In late summer of that year, some towns hosted as many as 4,500 overnight stays a month. Compared to 1949, when 3,710 guests spent 14,323 nights in all of the Bavarian Forest, the year 1954 saw almost three times as many visitors and more than three times as many overnight stays.71 By 1957, when the 5-day workweek had become the norm and the “expansion of leisure” had caught up with most economic sectors, hotel and pension rooms were in such short supply that some guests had to seek out private quarters.72 These advances brought not only hope to the economically depressed area. In contrast to the inter-German border, where the tourist industry focused mainly on short daytrips, extended vacations in the Bavarian Forest placed an additional burden on security in the area. In August 1959, for example, in any single day, more than 4,000 people hiked up or around Mount Osser, one of the area’s favorite destinations. In 1958, weekend traffic was significant enough that it warranted an “intensive engagement of patrols” at former checkpoints.73 Still, despite the briskly growing demand, local infrastructure was far from adequate. Tourists complained about the scarce sanitary facilities, few benches, and nonexistent road signs. It did not help that as late as 1956, according to one BBP complaint, the national and local tourist agencies had “knowingly concealed” the area’s Cold War significance from their customers.74 In other words, tourist marketing tended to privilege peace and downplay war. This was very much the visitors’ attitude as well. Disoriented borderland novices young and old gave border patrol officers plenty of reasons to worry. In August 1955, the BBP noted that the landscape’s calm appearance posed very real problems. Vacationers frequently “approached the border and attached themselves to the Czech barbed wire, either to satisfy their curiosity or take pictures. In most cases it was established that the visitors were . . . disoriented and therefore did not recognize the danger.” By and large, keeping tourists away from the border, official records suggest, was an almost physical challenge. Still, since “irresponsible curiosity and fl ippancy” explained a good number of such violations, offenders, as a rule, willingly retreated with thanks to the BBP for “instructions . . . and warning examples.” 75 That said, not all visitors were amenable to such warnings. The most frequent trespassers were typically neither government officials nor West

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German families, but instead were either the international participants in RFE’s fundraising campaigns or the Sudeten Germans. Once a year Czech émigrés and RFE’s US benefactors would flock to the environs of Tirschenreuth in the Upper Palatinate, from where they released thousands of balloons. These deceptively innocent-looking air-fi lled cushions carried anticommunist leaflets to Czechoslovakia’s residents and constituted an international air space violation that was difficult to keep under wraps.76 As one might suspect, such launches initiated some rather absurdist confrontations. Czechoslovak fighter planes regularly tried to shoot the balloons down. Inevitably, some shots landed to the west of the Iron Curtain, where the BBP, in response, rushed to increase the number of patrols and place posts to protect the Bavarian farmers in the vicinity, who feared unintended human casualties.77 No less alarmed were Sudeten Germans, who eyed RFE’s doings suspiciously. The Czech staffers at Radio Free Europe counted quite a few supporters of the postwar Beneš Decrees among them, and predictably, such views did not sit well with the expellees. In the fi rst half of the 1950s, celebrations of the Sudeten German “Days of Heimat” at the border occasionally served as sparring grounds between the two groups, necessitating close observation if not intervention on the BBP’s part.78 Still, compared to the chance to walk right along the border to the former Heimat, RFE’s activities were of secondary interest to the expellees. A photograph published in a Sudeten German newspaper in 1951 provides visual proof of the sacrifices made for the sake of experiencing such closeness (fig. 16). Subtitled “Just to See Heimat Means Great Happiness to Many,” the picture showed two young women sound asleep in the outdoors. Despite the caption’s emphasis on seeing, the circumstances of the girls’ night out concerned the author much more than the details of contemplating Heimat through the Cold War divide. As the camera’s flash cut through the darkness, it spotlighted the two bodies huddled so close together that their heads touched and exposed layers of clothing substantial enough to suggest a nighttime chill. Lest the viewer consider the girls’ excursion a youthful frivolity, the caption was also quick to comment on the location, explaining why the girls’ bivouac was nothing but a coat and their blanket little but a newspaper. “They only wanted to glance at their Heimat and hiked up Arber while on vacation. They had no money for an overnight stay,” observed the anonymous reporter, adding that he or she had “almost stumbled over them.” 79 The points made were two. The author’s commentary, on the one

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figure 16. “Just to See Heimat Means Great Happiness to Many.” From Grenzland: Illustrierte Zeitschrift der Vertriebenen 1, no. 12 (1951): 7.

hand, registered the modest beginnings of Sudeten German borderland tourism on the eve of Germany’s “miracle years.” The emphasis on the tidy decorum of the girls’ privation would contrast greatly with the attention lavished upon expellee travel, increasingly motorized, over the subsequent years, when the travelers’ own borderland reports implicitly testified to the newcomers’ economic rise. On the other hand, to capture the bifurcated dynamic of a visit to the Cold War borderlands, the feature exploited its subjects specifically as women and drew upon a clash between two aesthetic conventions for representing feminine beauty. The sleeping girls occupied an ambiguous position between that of the “beautiful corpse” (schöne Leiche), discovered, as it were, on a patrol of what the caption described as “the death zone,” and that of the blithely somnolent nymph, an iconographic staple of turn-of-thecentury “bedroom pieces”—that is, erotic paintings and postcards of forest scenes.80 The mention of “stumbling” conjured up a similar tension between discovering a lifeless body and coming across an organic element of nature—in short, between a war casualty and a body in untroubled repose.

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For the waking expellees, however, proximity to their one-time domiciles came with a caveat: it made many Sudeten Germans oblivious to the border demarcation. In part, such forgetfulness was induced by their territorial revisionism, an overt political provocation from the vantage point of the Czechoslovak border guards. Indeed, after June 1957, at the northernmost tip of the border, the so-called Borderland Academy (Grenzlandakademie) at Hohenberg an der Eger, a center for political education that moonlighted as a youth hostel, social club, and meeting point for Sudeten Germans, was particularly keen to add the Bavarian– Bohemian segment of the Iron Curtain to its all-German agenda. 81 Several postwar guidebooks, including Sieghardt’s popular synthesis of culture, geography, and history, reminisced about prewar tourism and fueled the already strong ressentiments by mentioning rival Czech nationalist gatherings across the border.82 But the Sudeten Germans’ failure to respect the border was not only on account of revisionism. Reportedly, it was their emotional state, induced by the encounter with Heimat at such close range, that carried much of the blame for the trespassing. As was the case for the clerics’ anxieties about merrymaking around Mitterfi rmiansreut discussed in chapter 2, tipsy, homesick, and overwrought Sudeten German revelers were a more unpredictable threat to international security than their leaders must have realized. Whether intentionally or by accident, a number of these enthusiasts regularly disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Whereas some returned by the end of the day, escorted by the disgruntled Czech border police, others would be gone without a trace.83 Their motivations ranged from an urge to visit relatives, to linger at a family member’s grave, or to take a look at one’s former home, to premeditated plans to re-migrate for good. Such transgressions were not circumscribed to any particular age group; young people were as likely to overstep the mark as their older compatriots. One such incident occurred during a Sudeten German youth group walk along the border near Waidhaus, not far from West German Tirschenreuth, when two youngsters in the group failed to heed their peers’ “insistent admonitions.” They crossed the border to Roßhaupt/ Rozvadov in the wee hours of 22 July 1951 and did not get back on time to return home to West German Kohlberg, several miles away.84 The wary BBP soon responded by taking much more systematic precautions. Such adjustments were particularly pressing given the swarms of Sudeten Germans who, in contrast to Iron Curtain visitors up north, did descend upon the border en masse, to paraphrase Astrid Eckert.85 When

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Sieghardt, a native Bavarian, claimed to have heard the cult song Deep in the Bohemian Forest (Tief drin im Böhmerwald) “on this side of the death strip almost every day,” he was not exaggerating. Although a 1965 overview of the area’s tourism promised that the woods, “vast beyond measure,” would never be overrun, they had long since become crowded.86 Relatively small groups of those who lived “scarcely three hours away from the Iron Curtain,” such as the fi fty-two Sudeten Germans shuttled to the border on 10 July 10, 1960, were hardly the issue. Much more daunting were the thousands who “streamed to the border” on summer weekends, as the expelled Bohemian Forest historian Erich Hans put it.87 Since the late 1940s, annual expellee conventions, usually held around the Pentecost, were the borderlands’ new normal. As early as June 1947, one of Watzlik’s letters to Skalitzky mentioned a gathering of six hundred former Böhmerwäldler in Upper Palatine Lam.88 Thirty years later, the traffic patterns had not waned. In June 1976, Maria Skalitzky, Sepp’s wife, heard from a friend vacationing in Lam, by then an established fresh-air resort, that “people from as far as Vienna” congregated at the foothills of Osser, in Heimat’s immediate proximity.89 For want of concerted guidelines from above, in many accounts of such trips the relationship between forest and border remained unstable for some time to come. The balance often tipped in favor of the former, so that nature received greater emphasis as the site of peace than as the locus of confl ict. On the front of the postcard mailed to Maria, only one of its four photographs depicted the border, while the other three zeroed in on the signature tourist landmarks and views. A similar scarcity of references to the divide’s presence characterizes a casual snapshot of the seventy-nine-year-old Sepp himself, resting, in 1980, against the open skies and a fringe of fi r tree tops during his ascent of Osser (fig. 17). The proverbially untouched appearance of the area’s nature overwhelmed its military significance not only in the eyes of Sudeten Germans. Phases in the border’s strategic enforcement inevitably ran up against environmentalist public outcry. While most concurred that the barrier’s western side needed to be militarily strengthened, there was no agreement on how this should be accomplished, and by whom. Therefore, when Bavaria’s government made arrangements with the German or US military, locals teamed up with tourists as the borderland’s rescue squad. The construction of a US radar detection station on Arber, on the table in 1957, is just one example. The mountain, the Bavarian press acknowledged, had long been a “noisy tourist backdrop.” Yet this civilian

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figure 17. Sepp Skalitzky and friend on Osser, 1980. StArchPa/ArchBö-NSka, uncatalogued. Courtesy of Böhmerwaldarchiv Passau.

cacophony, in contrast to the military soundtrack, was neither damaging nor unnatural. The former, from the viewpoint of the local infrastructure advocates, was welcome. The latter was not: if military roads supplanted tourist paths, it would be the end of Arber, they argued, proposing that as long as civilian visitors walked on this land, it should continue to be counted as “untouched.” Iron Curtain travelers, they insisted, were an integral part of the forest’s Cold War–era ecosystem.90 In light of sheer numbers, their suggestion was little short of astonishing. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the tidal wave of Sudeten Germans arriving at the border exceeded the BBP’s every expectation. Not without trepidation, one weekend in July 1955 the patrols took note of “3,500 individuals from all corners of the Federal Republic and, in part, from abroad” at an expellee get-together in Mähring, twenty kilometers from Tirschenreuth. Between “1,000 and 1,500 of them,” skeptically eyed by a reinforced troop of the Czechoslovak border guards, “were constantly in the immediate proximity of the border in order to throw a glance into the Heimat.” As if the BBP did not have enough on its hands, the inflow continued to rise. Only a year later, 12,000 former residents

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of Asch, a town in northwest Bohemia, came together in Selb, a center of porcelain manufacturing at the northern tip of the border. For three days in mid-August 1956, “large numbers of participants kept moving along the border.”91 Even the dramatic relaxation of Czechoslovakia’s travel restrictions in 1963 had only a marginal impact on the non-crosser traffic among the expellees: most Sudeten Germans feared that actually crossing the border “could easily become not the desired kind of journey, since everything there [was] different from the way it used to be.” 92 The desired kind of trip, it followed, ended right at the divide. For expediency’s sake, most expellee visitors arrived by car, as the 21-percent yearly increase in West German motorization between 1950 and 1960 bespeaks.93 It was this German investment in mobility—and prestige—that allowed individuals, families, and small groups to cover the up to four hundred and fi fty kilometers “across the Spessart, Franconian Jura, Fichtelgebirge [and] the Bavarian Forest.”94 The resulting designation of such journeys as borderland trips, rather than border trips, hints at their ambition. They eventually helped realize the prayer wall as a continuum. By the mid-1950s, the tightened belts of the two girls we saw earlier camping out at the foothills of Arber in 1951 would have been out of place in this new reflection of West Germany’s economic well-being. To outsiders at least, the recovery appeared so brisk that the title “economic calamity zone,” used by provincial and local administrators throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, looked like a misnomer in retrospect. Most rural Bavarian roads in the area had survived the war. Although initially there had been an absence of good train connections (stations such as Bayerisch Eisenstein–Markt Eisenstein/Železná Ruda, the fi rst railroad node in the Bavarian Forest, has suffered both war damage and subsequent Cold War closure), locals now reaped the benefits of the interwar road infrastructure and leisure culture.95 Soon, the sight of some “239 cars, forty-six buses, and one hundred motorcycles” was no longer exceptional.96 By the 1980s, one commentator would proudly note that the “old buses” had given way to “countless cars,” attesting to his countrymen’s economic successes. “It’s a beautiful day, I have time, and there I am in the car,” was a new motto that spoke to the idiom of the Sunday car-ride, not to a crusade against the foremost symbol of Cold War oppression. Pictures of seemingly endless columns of Sudeten German vehicles made regular appearances in the expellee press. In one such photograph from 1955 (fig. 18), a line of more than twenty cars and buses

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figure 18. “More than a thousand members of the Ackermann-Gemeinde and the ‘Junge Aktion’ arrived in three cars and 25 buses.” From Volksbote 7, no. 33 (September 1955): 1. Courtesy of Sudetendeutsche Zeitung.

belonging to the Ackermann-Gemeinde, a Catholic Sudeten German association, recedes into infi nity and disappears behind the horizon.97 The dense line of cars, wet asphalt, and open umbrellas indicate that the passengers were prepared for all types of weather. “All this transportation,” summed up one expellee participant, “brought curious people to the streets once traveled only very rarely or not at all.”98 In their eyes, a new Kulturlandschaft—the prayer wall—was poised to replace what had been lost to Cold War division. This growing familiarity with the border impressed the BBP—by the 1980s, travelers knew it well enough to “describe the particulars” to their uniformed escorts.99 Yet, such confidence, the officers suspected, coexisted with a certain forgetfulness, and it made people foolhardy. This was the case especially at the border’s southern end, where the draw of Stifter’s landmarks was strong and the trails particularly narrow. The area swarmed with visitors so desperate to see “Lake Plöckenstein [Plechý], so often praised by Stifter,” that they dared to make a quick dash across the divide and back.100 Nearby, the tapering routes that circled Dreisessel/Trˇístolicˇník, where rowdy brass musicians and their au-

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dience had been lured away from Mitterfi rmiansreut in the summer of 1952, routinely heaved with more than seven thousand dangerously nostalgic Böhmerwäldler.101 BBP officers breathed a sigh of relief whenever the conveners would fi nally get moving along the border instead of congregating in one place. Ultimately, the prayer wall, with its range of stops, would turn out to be a boon to security. Dreisessel, albeit not one of the forest’s highest peaks, became the point from which this “border rampart of pilgrimage sites” extended toward Tillen/Dylenˇ, yet another peak, in the north.102 By and large, borderland trips skimmed the Iron Curtain between these two key elevations. Both laid bare vistas of the Bohemian Forest, but as with most “high places,” they were more than just anchors for visual access. Upon them, the “physical and imaginative dialogue in which . . . knowledge is continuously built and destabilised, shaped and reshaped” had been in place for many decades, if not centuries.103 The far-reaching provenance of these hill’s mythologies lent multiple layers to the landscape of the prayer wall. Let us take a look at each of these two spatial brackets.

The Southern Bracket: Dreisessel’s Sagas It was hardly a coincidence that Dreisessel, the backdrop for Stifter’s High Forest, his last novel, Witiko, and his last completed short story, “From the Bavarian Forest” (“Aus dem Bayerischen Walde”), now became the southernmost cornerstone of the prayer wall. Eight hundred miles high, this peak was no stranger to division. Since 1765, to quote Stifter, it constituted a “nodal border point” (Grenzknoten), where the outlines of Bohemia, Bavaria, and Austria converged to form a triangle.104 Yet Dreisessel’s story, reproduced in High Forest as well as countless collections of local sagas, actually went back to “ancient pagan times.” It presaged the growing tension between nature’s own purview and the borders imposed by men, ever more palpable in the Cold War. Allegedly, the three rugged rocks atop the mountain had once served as thrones to three kings who had convened to stipulate their respective realms. In the midst of this gathering, the kings’ men went fishing on Lake Plöckenstein. Yet, their catch, no matter how abundant, just would not cook. The fish only got livelier in the cauldron’s rolling boil, until a terrifying storm overtook the forest and voices emanating from the lake reclaimed what had been taken: “Not everybody is home.” Fear-stricken,

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the men released their would-be dinner and returned to the camp. Having heard their tale, the kings cursed the place and condemned it to remain forever a wasteland.105 The burden of the kings’ prophecy must have weighed heavily, since the area remained “utter wilderness” through the end of the seventeenth century.106 The kings’ retreat left behind a dent in perceptions of the balance between unruly wilderness and human intervention. It unleashed fears of fragmentation between Natur- and Kulturlandschaft that lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century, when the Sudeten Germans metaphorically took the place of the missing fish. According to one borderland anecdote from the early 1950s, the muffled sound of the legend’s warning, “Not everyone is home,” haunted Czech border guards around the lake until, “fi lled with gripping terror,” they resolved to stay away from its environs.107 In this corner of the forest, fiction gained an upper hand, even over security concerns. During the Cold War, the mountain evolved into a complex meeting ground between legend and location-specific observational and strategic calculations. A key Stifter site, Dreisessel was such a frequently visited point that three different rotating patrols—from neighboring West German Haidmühle, Frauenberg, and Rosenberger Gut, where Stifter had fi nished Witiko—were put in place keep the tourists’ zeal in check.108 “Those who think that Dreisessel is [now] orphaned,” noted one Sudeten German visitor in 1952, must be plain wrong. Rather than losing visitors, Dreisessel had gained them. It “has become a pilgrimage site for those who had once lived across the border and [now] want to look into the familiar fields of Prachatitz, Schüttenhofen, Bergreichenstein, Krummau, Kaplitz, or Budweis to see at least the nearby mountains, if not the home towns.”109 The pilgrimage reference was not only figurative, as every year Dreisessel’s windswept cliffs beckoned thousands of Böhmerwäldler eager to celebrate St. Jacob’s Day (Jakobitreffen) in the immediate vicinity. Predictably, the tripartite Cold War border set limits to togetherness, as one group of 370 Böhmerwäldler from Austria’s Soviet-occupied zone were to fi nd out in July 1952, when its members tried (and failed) to join up with their erstwhile compatriots in Bavaria. Within two years, this kind of spontaneous intermingling would become all but impossible to imagine. By 1954, floodlights, steel towers, and radar stations under construction could be seen in Czechoslovak territory just to the east of the mountaintop.110 By Sieghardt’s admission, already before World War II

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“the entire surroundings of the border triangle were saturated with infinite, almost oppressive lonesomeness . . . , and some travelers felt a tinge of dread especially on the Bohemian side.” The advent of the new confl ict, in his mind, gave these specters no chance to dissipate. “Today,” he expounded, “the uncanny feeling is much stronger, now that everywhere watchtowers, barbed wire, and signs in Czech and German warn against the life-threatening adventure of crossing the borderline.”111 Yet even Sieghardt was not certain that the fortified border inspired only dread. “Uncanny,” his adjective of choice, described the widespread impression that the landscape of the Cold War–era Bavarian Forest was, as Freud’s famous essay had it, strange and nevertheless familiar. Sieghardt attempted to remedy this ambivalence with anecdotes meant to recuperate the latter and downplay the former. Some of his stories went so far as to revise Dreisessel’s foundational legend itself. According to his extensive compendium of rumors, facts, and myths, in late June 1956 Dreisessel witnessed a restaging of the legendary meeting between the three pagan kings, albeit to a very different effect. Because a Bavarian border marking from 1765 had gone missing during World War II, representatives of West Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia had joined forces to conduct a new land survey of the border triangle. Nothing about their meeting’s decorum could have anticipated the sour turn that East-West relations would take after the Hungarian uprising in the fall of that year. Participating officials ostensibly enjoyed the surprisingly “harmonious atmosphere” and exchanged gifts and “affectionate smiles,” genuine or not. Not only was the new border stone installed, but a Bavarian contractor also received privileges to harvest timber on the Bohemian side. At least for a time, the man had in his unlikely possession “the so-called ‘death zone’ at the Iron Curtain,” “the strip of the forest that spreads between the barbed wire on the Czech size and the German border.” Private ownership of the Iron Curtain struck Sieghardt as a dubious kind of investment. Yet, the case of “two dozen Bavarian woodsmen . . . permitted to cross the barbed wire . . . without great formalities” made clear that the barrier was not as intangible, impermeable, and, above all, not as fearsome as he had earlier described.112 On the contrary, the author’s reassertion of human agency compensated for the worrisome retreat of man in the face of nature, a retreat that had plagued Dreisessel since its mythical beginnings. The progressively broader sweep of Sudeten German interest in Dreisessel was another proof that the area’s dread was far from all-

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consuming. At the mountain’s foot, Lackenhäuser, a hamlet near Rosenberger Gut, had long been a magnet for Stifter’s avid readers. A bronze monument to the casualties of the expulsion from the Bohemian Forest, cast in 1976 by noted Viennese sculptor Berta Klement and unveiled right in the neighboring woods, only increased the allure of the otherwise secluded spot. To fuel this interest, in 1980 a chapel dedicated to Johann Nepomuk Neumann, the Bohemian-born nineteenthcentury Bishop of Philadelphia, added an overtly religious fi nish. While Dreisessel’s location remained unchanged, the span of its iconography continued to expand. As was the case with other frequented high places, the busy trails and the packed tavern at Dreisessel’s summit were directly connected to the “majestic panoramas that opened . . . in all directions,” including the Bohemian Forest, the Inn Valley, and the foothills of the German Alps. In Sieghardt’s words, “having read Stifter on the eve of the trip or even earlier, those who . . . partook of conviviality in the Forest Society hut on Dreisessel were drawn . . . further over the border ridge.”113 Yet, the lure of inaccessible places did not always leave its trace on the snapshots developed back at home. On the contrary, visitors often captured claustrophobic opposites of mountain panoramas. Despite its promising caption, “The glance from Dreisesselberg can roam even farther,” one photograph from 1955 showed little more than two rows of visitors bottlenecked on their way up and down the slim path that wound between the signature windswept cliffs (fig. 19). In the photo, those on their way down are fi xated on the steps, those moving upward are largely turned away from the camera, and a sense of opacity fi lls the remaining space. The unreadable facial expressions of the hikers suggest that the view from the top is uncertain: it could equally be a natural idyll or the no man’s land fi lled with the rubble of razed villages. The photograph posits that the tension between war and peace is not merely an anticipatory prelude to the border journey, it shapes that journey’s postscripts as well.

The Northern Bracket: Europe’s Center at Tillen Another “dignified [and] storied apex,” Tillen punctuated the prayer wall some two hundred kilometers north of Dreisessel. Its Cold War– era interpretations likewise reached to the area’s folkloric treasury.114

figure 19. “The glance from Dreisesselberg can roam even farther.” From Volksbote 7, no. 34 (September 1955): 8. Courtesy of Sudetendeutsche Zeitung.

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Centuries of rumors about the mountain’s own hidden treasures—allegedly, generations of adventurers had coveted its precious stones and metals—secured it a place of honor in every collection of local legends. The mineral deposits there were so extensive that the historians Bernhard Grueber and Adalbert Müller needed almost half a page to list all of them.115 Inspired by Tillen’s mythical past and its real-life geological wealth in equal measure, the turn-of-the century writer and colonialist Ernst Freimut described the “extraordinary mineral riches of Tillen” as “historic[ally accurate],” and designated them not just as a theme but also as the source of “many sagas.”116 In these tales, some of which Freimut took pains to rhyme, the beckoning glimmer of silver veins and minerals become the testing ground for human character, with troops of gnomes punishing greed and rewarding modesty. Early twentieth-century writers such as Freimut shed light on the mountain’s exterior as much as its interior. They pitted the pure dwellers of Mount Tillen (Tillenberg) against the corrupt and vain residents of the invented Tillen City (Tillenstadt) to fathom yet another stage where a confl ict between nature and civilization could play out. Over time, the thick cloak of myths around the mountain and the spectacular views from its apex fashioned Tillen into Dreisessel’s less-rugged counterpart in the north. Tillen hikes, or Tillenbergwanderungen, customary since the late nineteenth century, constituted another parallel between the two peaks. After 1945, these short walkabouts became imaginative vehicles for transporting Sudeten Germans in time as well as space.117 They took the expellees back to the heyday of their youth, spent exploring Tillen’s other side. Such time compression inspired Johann Andreas Blaha, a priest, educator, and one of the most prolific self-published Sudeten German poets after 1945, to sing praise to the outlying forests as the “green hall of God” (Gottessaal) and elide the Cold War realities altogether.118 It is only appropriate that his poem “Eger: Tillenberg Hike,” published in 1966, opens with a reverie: As if immersed in slumber as if again I’m young and moving, full of longing, through the woods at dusk. [Bin wie im Traum versunken als wär ich wieder jung

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und ginge sehnsuchtstrunken durch Waldesdämmerung.]

This sleepiness takes all eight strophes to dispel. First, when the “evergreen branches/together make a gate” and part to welcome the traveler, the ups and downs of Blaha’s simple iambs conjure up the energized pace of well-heeled footsteps on the trail. The hesitant dreaminess of the fi rst strophe, where the subjunctive dominates, slowly gives way to nimble similes that build scaffolds for an emerging soundscape: The evergreen branches merge into a gate: Welcome, merry guests in God’s green hall! [Die immergrünen Äste sich schließen zum Portal: Willkommen, frohe Gäste im grünen Gottessaal!]

The lyrical “I” takes in the forest sights (the “bright sunshine” streaming through the comb-like “tall tree trunks”) and its sounds (treetop whispers resembling a “magic harp” and a “muffled chorus of spirits”) as if they were the “best cure for the heart”: Like a magic harp, Like a quiet choir of spirits, the rustle of leaves resounds wondrously in my ear. The forest’s choral chants— The best cure for the heart! Far away chime the scythes Of mowers in the fields. [Wie eine Zauberharfe wie dumpfer Geisterchor, so klingt ein Wipfelrauschen mir wundersam im Ohr

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Des Waldes Chorgesänge— fürs Herz die beste Kur! Von fern nur Sensenklänge Der Schnitter auf der Flur.]

Yet why should a youthful heart ail? This question, exactly in the middle of the poem, gives the reader pause. The poet withholds any explicit answer, as we never fi nd out about the exact source of the wanderer’s discomfort. However, the mention of the inexplicably pining heart also betrays the hiker’s real age. It casts doubt on his dream of youth, identifies him as a homesick expellee, and becomes a foreboding of his imminent awakening. Yet, Blaha takes the trouble to mitigate the dream’s end: the forest’s sights and sounds contrast with little more than village life and the peaceful chimes of the mowers’ scythes down in the valley. Finally, his concluding proposition—“to escape into the forests/compels us the world’s noise”—disturbs the idyll. It comes across as a non sequitur, since the rural world that the poem paints does not produce nearly enough clatter. Only if we think of these two lines as a manifest symptom of the borderlands’ changed world can we read them as a wake-up call from the reverie with which the text begins. In the end, Blaha’s original attempts to sideline the border’s transformation fail. They will frequently fail also in the writings of his other compatriots—especially in their borderland reports, to which we will soon turn. Indeed, the Cold War affected Tillen more than Dreisessel. One difference between the northern and southern brackets of the prayer wall was especially pronounced. If Dreisessel from the very beginnings of its presence in the area’s cultural memory separated countries and set borders, Tillen, a 939-meter-high rock formation also spliced by the Iron Curtain, was thought to connect instead. “Contrary to popular belief,” remarked Joseph Brodsky in one of his essays, “the outskirts are not where the world ends—they are precisely where it unravels.” There, “men from the provinces” step in to prevent interiors from disintegration.119 At Tillen, locals and expellees preoccupied with the Cold War– era Bohemian–Bavarian borderlands both preempted Brodsky’s claim and intensified it. To see how, let us fast forward to the early 1980s. If we are to believe one expellee newspaper report from 1981, both locals and expellees from the adjacent areas to the border’s east had spent decades wondering: Where is the center of Europe?120 They were, of course, not alone in posing the question, since a good number of places

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have long competed for this honor. From physical centrality, the competition gradually shifted to symbolic importance, prevalent in the concurrent Eastern European intellectual “Mitteleuropa debate.” Yet, whereas the latter cultivated the Continent’s center as a third space, “in opposition to dualistic East-West thinking,” at the Iron Curtain such alternate visions were difficult to cherish.121 From atop Tillen, as we shall soon see, both sides indulged in demarcating a center of their own, as little sense as such splintering made. Far from a speculative abstraction, for the locals, determining the center’s location lay at the heart of belonging in the Continent’s fragmented core. Specifically, they wanted to know whether such a center was right under their feet, as they had once learned at school.122 It may seem unlikely that residents of a Cold War backwater should claim even some nominal centrality, yet precisely this was their aim. And on a mild fall day in 1985 their nagging doubts about the area’s valence on the divided continent dissipated at long last. As the “autumnal sunshine set over the landscape” just to the east of Waldsassen, it cast its light on those who had gathered to dedicate a center of Europe (Mittelpunkt Europas). The ceremony, as the attendee list suggests, was neither a spoof nor a practical joke. Present were several mayors of nearby villages, clergy, Sudeten German officials of various ranks, two members of the state and federal parliaments, and a requisite brass band. The guests embraced none of the ironic stance characteristic of the twenty-fi rst- century approaches to Europe’s famously fickle perambulating midpoints. The “fateful place” that all of them endorsed was none other than the mountain, Tillen (fig. 20).123 It may have been less fateful a spot had the division left its mark on the physical geography alone. Instead, it touched on a topography that was nothing if not fundamental “for European self-imagining and projection.”124 It appealed to the deep-seated desire of borderland residents to appear no less important than their less liminal neighbors elsewhere in the Federal Republic—a wish we have seen was already evident in chapters 1 and 2. Such aspirations had once been fertile ground for the area’s calibrations in 1865, when a trigonometric land survey by the Austro-Hungarian Military Geographical Institute had designated Tillen as the Continent’s geographic center.125 Whatever the accuracy of this fi nding—even expellee sources partial to the cause could not completely shed their skepticism126—the imperial authorities marked the site with a cube-shaped post, which soon became a magnet for hikers. The

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figure 20. Granite post at the “Center of Europe,” Tillen, near Neualbenreuth. Photo by the author.

advent of the Cold War, however, had left the new landmark stranded on the hill’s Czechoslovak side. No longer accessible for visitors in either East or West, it had vanished into a no man’s land. With the loss of the post, the West, as it were, begrudgingly let go of the Continent’s purported center, so that local residents saw themselves as the sole advocates of the post’s return to “real” Europeans. The Continent’s linchpin became an all-too-tangible stone of contention. “Because the continent’s geographical midpoint is not easy to identify

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and the stone post was not easy to reach,” suggested a later report, the local culture society in nearby Neualbenreuth “did everything to set up a new post on the Bavarian side.”127 Certain of the need to recompense for the loss, the society’s members set out to fi nd an argument that would lend more weight to their appeal. They did not have to search long: most were quick to register the loss of Tillen’s apex to Czechoslovak reconnoitering missions. At the beginning of the 1950s, BBP officers had taken note that Dylenˇ served as a prime observation point in the East.128 The mountain’s “stillness and seclusion,” remarked one visitor in 1959, “now seemed depressing,” due to this most obvious surveillance.129 The replacement of the rickety Czechoslovak watchtowers with a massive radar detection station in the 1960s did not escape the notice of civilian hikers on their perennial Tillenwanderungen, sponsored by the local office of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft (SdL). Between the 1950s and the mid-1980s, the hilltop’s designation as the West’s eastern stronghold eventually bolstered its role as Europe’s alleged core. The compasses centered on Tillen, dreamed SdL’s spokesman Walter Becher in 1982, would eventually “circumscribe . . . a free Europe and . . . bring peace and freedom.”130 Local activists embraced the reopening of the Tillen trail to tourist traffic in 1976.131 Walks along the path that ran parallel to the Iron Curtain provided welcome occasions to remind hikers that not only Sudeten Germans ought to be concerned with that which lay behind the Iron Curtain. In the activists’ minds, the time was ripe to place a bid on the center. As the dedication of 1985 shows, the center was “returned” to West Germany following decades of lobbying.132 Just as with Dreisessel in the mid-1950s, Tillen temporarily became the stomping ground for land surveyors at work to legitimate the scramble for Europe’s physically unattainable middle. The original marking on the Czechoslovak side was, of course, beyond recovery, unless one was willing to risk military escalation. That was why by the mid-1980s supporters of the idea had formed a united front strong enough to replicate what had once appeared lost for good. The outcome of their efforts, a copy of the original post, now graced Tillen’s Bavarian slope. “Tillen is the center of Europe,” proclaimed the chief of the local tourist office during the unveiling ceremony, full of hope that Neualbenreut, his little town, was now in possession of yet another attraction. The district administrator had an even loftier goal in mind: Tillen, he stated, should become a “reference point” for the East-West rapprochement.133 For other participants, the post’s

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reinstatement on West German soil, albeit a hundred meters below the original mark, put an end to the area’s “marginalization to the political and geographical periphery of Europe.”134 The center-periphery reversal, cast in stone at Tillen, posed a challenge to the graphic terminal tropes, such as “the butthole of the world” and a “dead track,” that dominated accounts of the Iron Curtain.135 The Cold War fault line, as Tillen’s imagined significance suggests, was no longer a place “where the world ended,” to borrow the title of Daphne Berdahl’s seminal study. Rather, the border’s convoluted route spelled both “alpha” and “omega.” It was as much an end to some undertakings as a beginning for a host of others. In the latter category, borderland reporting was prominent.

Travelers Write Border Awareness Accounts of travelers’ trips to individual Iron Curtain locations was already making a regular appearance in Sudeten German reportage by 1950, even before the border was fortified and very soon after the fi rst homeland leaflets reached their fi rst subscribers, starved for the minutiae of life on both sides of the divide.136 Borderland reports were shaped precisely by such an expectation. The conspicuous lack of extensive editorial intervention, common in the mainstream expellee press, preserved an almost stream-of-conscience quality and spontaneity in travelers’ written descriptions of the Continent’s physical division. Ridden with inconsistencies and loose ends, these were not the tightly strung, programmatic narratives of the kind endorsed by the SdZ. The remainder of this chapter illuminates how their thematic and stylistic idiosyncrasies worked to shape the borderland report as a narrative form. This brings us to the era of the borderland trips looking beyond just one locale, which set in only with the advent of Germany’s “miracle years.” Franz Reipirch, who signed his reports merely with his initials, “F.R.,” was one of the earliest and most influential travelers to the border, free to move about in his own car. His reports consisted of several densely printed pages of notes, which he then shared with his former compatriots, thus laying the groundwork for the many border reporters to follow. Published between 1952 and 1953, his accounts gained a devoted readership and continued to be cited by others well into the 1980s. They were seminal for redefi ning the genre by connecting it to the pro-

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duction of Cold War–specific awareness—clearly, not the Sudeten German traveler’s forte. This awareness was intended to help the author’s successors situate themselves on the ground. Like many contributors to the homeland leaflets, Reipirch, who traveled “along the Iron Curtain” in late 1952, did not disclose his full name, known to us only from its mention in later sources. This decision could have two mutually exclusive explanations. On the one hand, the audience of homeland leaflets was small enough that authors might have been hesitant to attach their names to exceedingly personal views and experiences. On the other hand, the circle of readers was so tight that guessing who stood behind the initials must not have been difficult. The downside of having such a narrowly defi ned audience is that we know little about the anonymous travel writers’ personae. Of course, given their subject matter, it is not hard to guess their place of origin and current residence in West Germany. If family members have accompanied the author, then it is sometimes possible to infer the writer’s gender from an article’s context. The social background is, likewise, uncertain, although occasionally, the author might use an academic or professional title. The earliest cases thus suggest that authors were primarily middleclass men, “new citizens . . . who had already come into ownership of earthly possessions,” as one of them put it.137 Although, once interest in borderland travel skyrocketed and bus tours gained momentum, mobility was no longer the privilege of the chosen few. Morever, women regularly appeared in the photos that illustrated these reports from their earliest days, and by the 1970s they were credited as regular contributors. With respect to Reipirch, what we can surmise is, however, particularly limited. His personal timeline contains just one piece of information: his birthplace, Eger. And yet the richness of the writer’s borderland experiences, apprehensions, and hopes compensates for the gaps in our knowledge about him. Although Reipirch divulged nothing about his job or family, it is certain that he did not travel alone, but enlisted an open-ended number of companions, real as well as presumed. Let us follow them. Reipirch narrates his texts in the first-person plural, and his use of the collective “we” is indeterminate enough to take the implied readers along on a vicarious adventure and help situate any number of them visà-vis the divide’s coordinates. “To the east of us,” Reipirch announces in the opening line of one report, “extends the Czech border, along which we want to travel today.” The modality of the fi rst sentence makes a nod

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to the self-conscious, individualist empiricism of modern travel narratives.138 The plural voice, however, articulates the experience of the Iron Curtain as a shared undertaking. Reipirch’s report renegotiates the parameters of the equation in which “the modern tourist travels with the crowd, but mediates the travel experiences as an individual.”139 Its author travels with a crowd (albeit a small crowd that fits in one car), makes a claim to speak for and as a crowd, and targets yet another crowd when the report is published. Only occasionally, as we will see, does his magisterial plural voice fail. In this account, the travelers leave Hof, one of the border’s northernmost points, behind and soon encounter their fi rst noteworthy sight. Zooming in on the opening vista, the narrative makes clear that Sudeten German borderland travel is not just about the fence per se, but rather it is about the fence’s overall impact on the area. Reipirch spills less ink on the barrier’s appearance and more on what that barrier does to the landscape. “The sensation of the Cold War frontline” here arises not from the physical partition alone140; it encompasses the local forest and views of Heimat no less than the military fortifications. And, precisely, glimpses of Heimat greet the traveler outside Hof: across the divide, the houses of Asch and outlying Hainberg are clearly visible. Visibility is an essential component of borderland travel, not only because Sudeten Germans mimicked the surveying postures of the border police, but also because clear views were often a rarity not to be taken lightly.141 And yet, precisely, good visibility, the report will eventually suggest, promises as many hazards as advantages. But fi rst the driver and the passengers press on, unaware of the possible pitfalls in store. To the west of the divide, at nearby Plößberg, they get briefly distracted by a railway station into which “a train once crossed and stood here for four weeks, prior to being returned to the Czechs.”142 This surprisingly curt reference to one of the most spectacular escape stories of the early Cold War, that of the “freedom train” (discussed in the introduction), suggests that Reipirch is not necessarily on the lookout for sensational incidents. He either measures eventfulness in different units or is unconcerned with it. Furthermore, the abbreviated mention of the incident serves as the fi rst indication that the author would prefer to keep his eyes locked on the present.143 Not coincidentally, the tense of the narrative is also the present, even when it is funneling extended reminiscences. Maintaining the focus on the here and now, however, is easier thought than done. Warding off memories of the personal

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past, distant or proximate, turns out to be as difficult as resisting the allure of the plentiful tourist hubs nearby. From one paragraph to the next, the text’s flow becomes predicated on the duality of acknowledging such allure and its repeated disavowal. Already by the end of Reipirch’s introduction, the prose insinuates that keeping the journey’s most immediate goal—the Iron Curtain—in clear focus will be a greater challenge than anticipated. As mental and physical distractions mount, the author not only alludes to this difficulty—he has the narrative perform it. “Travelogues,” as Debbie Lisle points out, “have a narrative framework that follows the linear passage of beginning, middle, and end,” or “home—away—home.”144 As we shall see, Reipirch’s account belies such linearity, on the one hand, and strives to restore it, on the other. Throughout the report, the author repeatedly gives in to temptation to pursue either memories or actual landmarks. Each time, he relies on fi rsthand knowledge to describe them with great precision, only to negate their relevance to the trip’s scope as promptly as possible. Driving appears to be a fitting metaphor for both the physical experience of the trip as well as its narrative. Whenever a wrong or undesirable turn or detour—physical, mental, perceptual, or mnemonic—comes up, Reipirch rushes to get back on track, literally and figuratively. Borderland reports in general, and Reipirch’s report in particular, often draw on such approximations and interdependences between physical and narrative movement. Thus, when the smokestacks of the porcelain factories that once made the West German town of Selb “world-renowned” come into sight, Reipirch intervenes to cool off his and his fellow travelers’ budding consumerist zeal and to reemphasize the most immediate purpose of the trip: “Today we do not want to think about Rosenthal porcelain or another well-known company, we want to journey along the border.” The trip, as this aside suggests, should be about “the consumption of experiences rather than things,”145 and the expellees should know better than to let themselves be seduced into the material culture of the “miracle years”—a leitmotif in their discussions at the time.146 Reipirch’s unyielding apprehensions, however, intimate that not even all experiences are legitimate. Arriving in Waldsassen a short while later, the author slips into a brief personal reminiscence about visiting the town on weekends, “well before 1938,” the year when the Sudetenland acceded to Nazi Germany. In this regard, Reipirch, of course, is not the only expellee to be overcome by memories. While on vacation near

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Rachel in the Bavarian Forest, Erich Hans and his wife, both Bohemian Forest historians and long-time correspondents with Maria Skalitzky, began their postcard to her with a flashback to hiking “in the mountains of Heimat.”147 Yet Reipirch, unlike Skalitzky’s friends, strains not to indulge in the past. Already in the following sentence he nips his recollection in the bud: “We disregard the frescos, we also don’t think about the famous cloister library, no, we keep on driving.” Further on the same page, an analogous interruption reoccurs when a sighting of a church steeple in Reipirch’s hometown of Eger lures the author out of the car and onto an imaginary train about to enter the town’s station. At fi rst, the writer fancies a stroll past the many scrupulously enumerated highlights: “And so into the city, passing by Hotel Viktoria . . . , to the intersection with Schanzstraße, but fi rst Fischer Engineering Works, Gehaag creamery, and what you will, all the houses on Bahnhofstraße up until the Market Square.” Any Egerer’s heart, the following sentence proclaims, would beat faster at such an exciting prospect, and yet Reipirch brusquely puts his anticipation on hold, for the fi rst time losing the authoritative “we” to the subjective “I.” Like a petulant child, or else a dictatorial patriarch at the steering wheel, the author suddenly rejects the very thought of lingering: “Today I don’t want to describe Eger, that would be worth too many a line. I am only thinking about it because I . . . have it in front of my eyes.” Reipirch’s negative metanarrative commentary reflects the fragility of his authority as a storyteller, the constant tension between past and present, and the generally bifurcated perceptions of the borderlands along the Czechoslovak–West German divide that I have discussed throughout this chapter. At the same time, it sketches the physical and textual parameters of this travel. Before we examine the above dyads of propositions and their negations, let us fi rst take a look at the kinds of descriptions and observations that propel the narrative rather than bring it to a halt. As the trip progresses from Selb through Waldsassen and on to Mähring, about fi fty kilometers to the south, these elements fall into three distinct categories: the forest, Heimat, and the Iron Curtain itself. The fi rst of these, the forest, is recurrently described as “protective,” “beautiful, old, and mighty,” with “trees [that] grow and thrive on both sides of the border.” It ostensibly holds the fractured landscape together, shields the travelers from Czech surveillance, conceals the all-too-unsettling views of Heimat in ruins, and even functions as a guard against the overwhelming memories of the author’s former life under its canopy, which threaten to run

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amok whenever trees fail to block the view to the eastern side. For one, “Tillen, the mountain surrounded with sagas, and its storm-tousled mop said to be Europe’s geographical midpoint” certainly qualify as such a safeguard. Likewise, all is calm when “the heights of the Kaiserwald . . . delimi[t] the view of the East.” Yet, the involuntary plunge into reminiscences lurks only a comma away, and “the vast dark woods around Glatzen, Schönficht . . . , the memory of Frohnau, . . . , the black waters of upland moors, log-floating streams, the unforgettable days in the Kaiserwald year-round” predatorily “grip” the narrator whenever he “can glance over there.” Throughout the report, the real-life forest acts as a fi lter charged with diffusing memories and mental afterimages before the latter can take hold of the expellees. The urgency of such fi ltering is directly related to Reipirch’s tendency to yoke seeing and remembering. It is as if the eye’s access to the traces of the past across the Iron Curtain releases a flood of memories with the incalculable sweep of a forest fi re. This conjunction, analyzed in the following chapter, directs our gaze downward into the valleys and backward into the past. In Reipirch’s account, however, it is not merely a longing gaze at a lost object beyond recuperation.148 As I detail below, it looms, rather, as a peril capable of derailing both the journey and the narrative. From this vantage point, the authorcum-narrator’s omniscience—his long-standing familiarity with the area and the ability to name exactly what can be seen under optimal weather conditions—is a burden that can set off derailment only too easily. Instead, the question whether all of this ought to be seen haunts the text. The report is as much an exploration of the physical borderland as an investigation of the slim line that separates these two modalities. Not in possession of a magic wand to hem every traveled road with a protective fringe of trees or wish the unnerving sights of Heimat away, Reipirch often skirts the very possibility of glancing across the border. At such points, the narrative again emulates a car ride, with sights on the eastern side listed in quick succession, as if we were whizzing by them at full speed. Although the illusion of velocity approximates these passages to succinct guidebook-style descriptions, the air of detachment does not hold out long. Moments later, the woods turn into clearings, revealing the locales across the divide and letting recollections loose. Reipirch gives in to memories reluctantly and almost fearfully, scrambling to maintain a tightly controlled perspective on the second element, Heimat. Its introduction takes place early on and immediately follows

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Reipirch’s foiling of consumerist longings for Rosenthal porcelain in the text’s second paragraph: Right in front of us a roadblock; a turnpike separates East and West. Between, overgrown with grass, is no-man’s-land. Only a little path to Asch is held open, and even that is rarely treaded. To the left is a German customs office, to the right an inn with a garden adjacent to the border. Near the [German] customs office, a couple of steps ahead, rises a Czech customs office, a construction in the well-known style of Czech government buildings. Red slate roof, blue-gray plasterwork, broad cornices and windows, now lone and abandoned with partly broken panes, at the roadside a border marking with white, red, and blue; this is how old Heimat greets us, this is how Asch begins on the other side. Ahead one suspects a roadblock, blown-up houses to the right and further down cattle grazing in the garden but no people: this is how the border town lies in ahead of us, still and abandoned. If it weren’t for a railcar, one could think that the world ends here.”

The gist of Reipirch’s description is a very terse formula: the eastern borderlands look “still and abandoned.” And yet the excerpt is obviously nowhere as laconic. If Sudeten Germans who reported from the interGerman border opted for the paratactic brevity of “the same impression: barbed wire—mine fields—restricted area—field of fi re—prohibited zone,”149 the sight of Heimat compelled the returnees from the Czech– Bavarian border to go to much greater lengths. Like many other reports of its kind, Reipirch’s piece supplies the readers with long lists of objects and sites on both sides of the barrier as well as an inventory of what is left of the razed villages in the East. The author is so overwhelmed by and breathless from the resulting catalogue of damages that the narrative voice once again temporarily slips from “we” to “I”: “I would only like to remind [you] of Rathsam, just past the turnpike in Schirnding, or Mugl and Lohhäuser in Marienbad county”—that is, the villages turned into a no man’s land. Some of these details are, as Roland Barthes would have put it, “predictive.” The physical sight of broken windows and the mental images of untended cattle—staples of expellee reportage and fiction alike—are arguably functional because they round off the picture of desolation. Others, such as the color of the plasterwork, window size, and nuances of architectural style, add little to the point. They call to mind Barthes’s term “insignificant notation.” The latter stands for the

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details that “no function . . . can justify”—that is, no function other than producing “the reality effect” in a literary text. Defying Barthes’s assumption that documentary writing operates a “self-sufficient” notion of reality and therefore has little use for this kind of minutiae, Reipirch heavily draws on just such “narrative luxur[ies].”150 Their surplus of the real accomplishes at least three goals. It anchors the predictive moments in their circumstantial contexts; mitigates the excerpt’s bias, whether personal or ideological; and compensates for the purely speculative substance of the paragraph’s fi nal lines. Moreover, it contributes to crafting a credible backdrop for several widespread Cold War topoi that Reipirch wields to code Heimat, imagined and seen, as an eastern locale. Abandoned, decrepit, defi led, and emphatically gray, his Heimat is, initially, a “world’s end” where the German language is supposedly co-opted to project communist slogans “a là [Otto] Grothewohl” (East Germany’s prime minister) westward. Its simplest juxtaposition to Bavaria yields, at fi rst blush, a gloomy picture of economic mismanagement and backwardness, sketched with a few broad strokes borrowed from Western modernity’s discourse on the East: “On the one side carefully cultivated fields, inhabited villages and farms, on the other side ruins and brushwood as far as one can see.” Minutiae naturalize these highly interpretive, subjective observations as if they were facts of undisputed historical accuracy. And yet to reduce this and other borderland reports to mere reiterations of allochrony—the term for expressing the Other’s time lag—would be shortsighted.151 A closer look at the report’s second page, where such alleged certainties are called into question, demonstrates why. Whereas the fi rst three paragraphs of the text gloss over the contradictions—despite his extensive description of Heimat’s decay, the author soon interjects that “on the surface things look the way we remembered them”—the article’s second half irons out these inconsistencies in Heimat’s favor. As with many of his traveling peers, the author fi nds it progressively more difficult to excoriate Heimat, the eastern location notwithstanding. It certainly is a case of the familiar gone wild—but familiar nonetheless. To share this sensibility, Reipirch proceeds to rehabilitate Heimat by revising some of the earlier comments. After all, the penultimate line of the text spells out the hope of a return to Eger, and emotional detachment from the native landscape would only get in the way of such an aspiration. As a result, a change of tone is in order: we are, the au-

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thor hastens to correct himself, looking at a “beautiful German Heimat” rather than at the world’s gray limit. There is, furthermore, “no more beautiful view [than] the slopes of the Kaiserwald, the Ore Mountains, [and] the Fichtelgebirge.” Similarly, the juxtaposition between the divide’s two sides, rewritten on page three, gives only a false promise of a high-contrast déjà vu of a lively West and a moribund East. Unlike some other reporters, Reipirch does not uphold the contrast between “the desolate and overgrown (versteppten) landscape” and “the rich mosaic of colors,” “the well-kept asphalt road” and “the primeval forest jungle” (Urwaldgestrüpp), or “pretty houses and flowering gardens” and “a dead landscape, overgrown, neglected, lifeless.”152 Instead of pitting East and West against each other, as the opening of Reipirch’s following sentence may fi rst suggest, the text proceeds to reunite both landscapes under the same elements: “On the one side the many colors of fields, forests, meadows and villages, on the other side the gray and brown of an abandoned country, upon which the nature bestows a dulcet mildness, since, after all, the same sun, wind and rain are on both sides.” The residual familiarity of the East as Heimat and the resulting inability to declare this landscape flat-out alien distinguishes Sudeten German borderland writings from those produced by other visitors to the Cold War frontline. Such palpable ambivalence vis-à-vis the East significantly complicates our image of stark Cold War polarities and provocatively implies that even the West’s most ardent Cold Warriors had trouble formulating their Eastern antipathies defi nitively. Illuminated by the same sun as the West’s supposedly colorful landscape, Heimat’s present-day condition is, then, not merely a function of its location in the East writ large. Rather, Reipirch indicates that it is a consequence of the landscape’s unfortunate conscription to the Cold War borderlands—a forceful third element in the narrative. Reipirch’s sarcastic remark that “now ‘order’ reigns” east of the barrier this time refers not to economic mismanagement, but to the destruction mandated by the border’s fortification. The rubble is gone, but “nothing else can be seen, only the white posts of the barbed wire fence over the meadow at the clearing—here is the borderland.” The landscape, we discover, is largely “cold and inhospitable” not because Czechs are its new residents, but because it is largely uninhabited and drowned in the glare of nighttime floodlights. The end of the report recasts the Czechs, initially introduced as German-haters, in a more nationally indeterminate role, as heavy-handed Cold Warriors who “deposit mines, . . . span barbed

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wire, . . . build bunkers and [dig] trenches; they build and work, but nothing positive, only negative.” Reipirch fi rst relies on what Bernd Greiner has termed the “synchronicity of the nonsynchronous.”153 An overlap between varied “temporal horizons,” past and present, is underscored to help the author imagine the Czech labor of destruction by way of a much earlier confl ict: in front of him, he indicates, lies “a village destroyed in the Thirty Years War.” Yet, before Reipirch can fi nish the sentence, he interrupts himself to insert a corrective negation of his analogy to the past: “No, a home village gratuitously destroyed after World War II.” In a parallel process, the narrative transforms the “front of hatred against all things German” into a Cold War front not confi ned to ethnic or confessional strife. It is on this front that Reipirch positions himself as an embedded correspondent avant la lettre. To make sure that readers do not consider this too casual a journey, the author periodically alerts them to the danger of being at the barrier. Whereas in the opening paragraphs the travelers observe “the course of the border from afar,” the narrative rushes to create an impression of nearing the divide: “Before we reach the bridge over the Eger, the border runs inside the roadside ditch, and it is not advisable to stop here, since unfortunately too often Czech soldiers stood on the other side and entertained themselves by shooting over here.” “Woe is him,” reinforces Reipirch two pages further, “who crosses the road ditch by mistake, they will shoot him mercilessly.” Following the border in close contact (in Tuchfühlung), as a later visitor described it, helps ground the writer’s authority in fi rsthand experience.154 The term “border contact” (Grenzberührungen), used by others, attributes corporeal intimacy to the gained knowledge.155 To various degrees, the three contextual hinges prevalent in Reipirch’s account and characteristic of subsequent borderland reports—forest, Heimat, and border—bring to the fore another premise that underlies such writings: the fear of transgression, physical or imagined. As we have seen earlier, at this relatively early point in the history of the Cold War barrier—in late 1952, when Reipirch made the journey, or in early 1953, when the report appeared in print—this fear was not yet something that either travelers or their readers felt readily. It had to be produced and communicated fi rst. Precisely its public communication, Bernd Greiner observes, had the potential not only to change this emotion’s perceptions but also to “generate fears of . . . an entirely new range.” Seen from this vantage point, Cold War narratives of the early 1950s aspired, on the

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one hand, to “keep up and even foment” fears, and on the other, to contain them. They “intimidate[d] and securely cradle[d]” at the same time. Reipirch’s report belongs to such “dramaturgical balancing acts.”156 Yet, within the report, the production of fear is neither a goal in its own right nor a counterweight to subsequent redemption, as Greiner suggests. It serves a specific purpose: to create a new kind of border awareness. Surely, in the late nineteenth and especially early twentieth century, Bohemia’s ethnic Germans felt no lack of border consciousness, or Grenzlandbewußtsein. This was a nationalist ambition fi rst ascribed to and later internalized by the so-called “frontier people,” minorities who inhabited another state’s or ethnicity’s periphery. Yet Cold War–era border awareness, as Sudeten Germans soon discovered, was a very different, if not antithetical mindset. Border consciousness openly challenged borders and brandished images of their violation; it was offensive no less than defensive. Border awareness, in contrast, was a much more modest endeavor. By and large, it amounted to situational discernment and the ability to navigate the newly fortified landscape so as not to end up among its casualties. The need for such discernment arose from two kinds of exigencies. As we have seen, not all Sudeten German visitors perceived the Iron Curtain as “a wall of China,” a difficult-to-miss jumble of “posts, [construction] beams, planks,” or an “impenetrable thicket” wrapped with double-wire fence and crowned, as an expellee observer put it, with watchtowers.157 Many had trouble identifying it in the fi rst place. At times, it was a question of ill-chosen idiom. Some, for instance, suggested that the Iron Curtain did not fall along the Czechoslovak–West German border but rose there instead: “the uncultivated land, overgrown with head-high grass, speaks too clear a language that this is where the Iron Curtain goes up.” For others, the cause lay in purely visual impressions, according to which the barrier was “absent or invisible” in forested areas. As a regular border reporter put it as late as 1985, the fence appeared “not particularly conspicuous” and therefore all the more difficult to detect.158 An earlier visitor described such blind spots as “dashes” (Gedankenstriche). Such a disjunctive metaphor evoked both the loss of the speaker’s physical coordinates and the failure of verbality at large, which dashes frequently convey. Finally, Sudeten Germans often chose not to see the border. Even if their eyes were looking right at it, their hearts, as one of them admitted, refused to accept the barrier’s existence.159 Endorsed by amateur reporters such as Reipirch, border awareness

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was supposed to countermand both the emotional obliviousness of the border’s presence and the political refusal to accept its course, if for no other reason than to help people avoid being killed or arrested. Oskar Rohrbach, a chaplain for a Federal border police unit, used his account from 1961 to compare this burgeoning sensibility to one’s own interior “sermon of up-to-here and no-further” (Bishierher und Nichtweiter). Others eventually somatized this wisdom as “a tension that takes control of us and lets us be especially vigilant lest we leave the border(s) of the Federal Republic.”160 Reipirch’s report provides plenty of illustrations of why in 1952 such discernment was not yet second nature to the expellees. Their attachment to the forest as a protective cocoon against the views of Heimat in distress, and their single-minded devotion to Heimat as a beckoning destination of imaginary border-crossings, hindered their ability to recognize the area’s Cold War perils. The line between East and West, if we are to believe the author, was as easy to trespass as the boundary between reality and memory and as easy to lose sight of as the distinction between the authoritative “we” and the subjective “I.” Only the glimpses of the Iron Curtain could alert the visitors—and their readers—to this realization. Reipirch’s descriptions of such views, with which he peppered the text, enlisted fear to spur discernment. Precisely the budding fear of transgression can explain the abovementioned sequence of distractions and their disavowals throughout Reipirch’s text. The porcelain factory, the tourist highlights of Waldsassen, and the beckoning streets of Eger contain their own transgressive possibilities. First, their appearance at key points in the narrative underscores the high probability of slippage between memory and reality. Remembering Heimat, from Reipirch’s perspective, is tantamount to forgetting about the border and thus to coming a step closer to its physical violation. Reminiscences, as the aforementioned anecdotes of Sudeten German travelers disappearing behind the barrier bespeak, not only traverse the metaphorical boundary between the present and the past, but also incite physical border-crossings: these, as a later visitor put it, begin in people’s minds.161 Second, each brief detour invites the travelers to stray from the journey’s most immediate goal; it promises sights that have little to do with the Iron Curtain. In other words, distractions draw too much attention to peace and not enough to war. They thus impinge on the parameters of borderland travel as a category in the process of being defi ned—a process to which Reipirch eminently contributes. His contribution is both to describe what borderland travel is or is

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not and to give its description a specific narrative frame. Lest the reader should imagine a haphazard car ride, the text casts the borderland trip as a distinct form of travel with a claim at a destination of its own—the Iron Curtain. Concurrently, it also positions the borderland report as a form of writing conditioned by its own telos—to generate knowledge about and awareness of the East–West divide. Yet, the text makes obvious that both the physical destination and the narrative telos have to be reinforced constantly. To accomplish this, the author/narrator sets up each visual or mnemonic detour as a literary digression. The course of the trip, in turn, takes on a role of a tentative plot. In this scheme, each deviation from the order of the route suggests a potential departure from the order of the narrative. Digressions threaten to thwart the report’s telos and question the possibility of the plot’s most satisfactory end—in this case, a safe return home.162 In Ross Chamber’s apt description, digression is nothing if not “a pleasurable experience” derived from “the relaxation of vigilance, the abandonment of discipline.”163 Reipirch’s report suggests that this pleasure comes at too high a risk, and the literary “relaxation of vigilance” acts as an all-too-literal symptom of the loss of awareness in the physical borderlands. Textual digressions assimilate the concern with physical transgression into the text’s halting flow. Notably, Reipirch not only articulates each digression but also negates it to stipulate what the travelers will not do. Negation, on the one hand, could be interpreted at face value, as an impetus that genuinely helps the reporter wrest control over the collective “we” and reassert authority over the journey as much as the text. The author, in this case, is in charge because he can summon the powers of proscription and set boundaries to what is appropriate or not. By frustrating digressions, negation helps reorder the narrative, sharpen the focus on the area’s Cold War transformations, foil reminiscences, and thus recuperate the report’s vaunted documentary thrust. On the other hand, however, negation can be understood as disingenuous. We may recall that nay-saying, as Freud once suggested, is but another form of aye-saying. Negation, in Freud’s view, is nothing but intellectual acquiescence of the denied and an attestation of the subject’s continued interest in it.164 Freud’s understanding of negation, indeed, closely parallels his later summary of the structure of disavowal, described as simultaneous retention of belief or interest and its surrender.165 From this vantage point, Reipirch’s refutations can be understood to reaffi rm the potency of the thrall in which the lure of memo-

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ries and landmarks holds him. The resolutions not to think, see, or reminisce are then the exact opposites of that which is on his mind. These diametrically opposed interpretations reflect two confl icting forces within borderland travel and reporting after Reipirch as well. On the one hand, both undertakings display the resolve to explore the local meanings of the Cold War and address the ongoing confl ict’s intervention in the landscape. On the other hand, they insist that reminiscences cannot be wiped out easily. The past matters, and travelers-cum-writers volunteer their texts to defer the landscape’s ongoing disintegration in order to bring border and land back together—on paper if not in reality.

Coda: The Failure of Bloc Mentalities In the following decades, up until 1990, when homeland leaflets would bring their readers some of the last borderland reports, the amount of attention given to war and rupture or, conversely, peace and conciliation, varied widely. Yet developing and sustaining these two contrary emphases remained a signature trait of the Sudeten German adaptation of this genre. Incongruous as it may have been, borderland bikers described the genuine thrill of the “harsh and yet native wind” caressing their faces. Groups of senior citizens admitted to relishing casual lunches and sweet cakes in the barrier’s immediate proximity—a custom decried as distasteful along the inter-German segment.166 To the “uninitiated,” observed Skalitzky, the landscape was the same “ancient piece of land, . . . a consonance of form and color that can hardly be more pleasant in another low mountain range.”167 If that was the case, then was “the border really safe (gefahrlos),” incredulously asked a Sudeten German submitting his “factual report” to the widely read Egerer Zeitung in 1957. Disbelief was justified. After all, in the subheading, Rudi, as the author identified himself, promised his audience vignettes of no less than “100 kilometers of melancholy and sorrow.” His own answer to the question, however—“It is never safe at the border, and yet the tone has been polite thus far”—echoed Reipirch and anticipated a landscape considerably more complex.168 While present-day interpreters of battlefield tourism relegate war to the past and peace to the present—“The tourist [wanders] through a once dangerous place where the agony of the combat has given way to

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the tranquility of peace”—Cold War–era Sudeten German borderland travelers claimed to experience both contemporaneously.169 In their accounts, the “crazy wilderness” of no man’s land and the attendant “limitess dilapidation” were always only a few sentences away from Heimat’s “blossoming garden” and “gigantic carpet.”170 On the one hand, reports such as Rudi’s traffic in a number of uncanny contrasts. From a distance, “the white porcelain heads [of] isolators” atop the electric barbed wire fence resemble “little wild meadow flowers.” But, of course, they “bring death and doom instead of aroma and joy.” From the flowers of evil, the story soon segues into a Stifterian moment, when Rudi and his fellow travelers stand across from Asch. “It is still there,” they joyously exclaim in an echo of the sisters who contemplated their home in the now classic novella. With great relief, Rudi notes that the “smoke rose from chimneys and the sound of industrial noise reached us,” and he momentarily assumes “everything . . . to be in order.” It is not long, however, before a pair of strong binoculars corrects this mistaken initial impression: “Where once colorful and cheerful windows looked across to Bavaria, empty window frames now gaped at us. Everything is gray on gray, dismal and deserted.”171 On the other hand, moments of surprising levity—or, perhaps, comic relief—parry the notes in the minor key. At one of the stops, the Czech border guards, otherwise suspected of keeping travelers under constant surveillance, suddenly loosen up. According to the stunned Rudi, they strike up friendly conversation and stop short only at having a group picture taken.172 Elsewhere, Czech patrols are overheard singing German pop songs. On the surface, this comment could be Rudi’s way of asserting the West’s superiority. In this interpretation, the inability of the socialist music scene to come up with its own catchy tunes opens doors to the triumph of Western popular culture not only east of the divide, but right at it. If the ultimate socialist loyalists, as border guards were commonly perceived, hum German chart-toppers, then neither the system over which they watch nor the border that delimits it can be quite so permanent. Yet Rudi’s ironic stance has another, much deeper meaning. It speaks to the challenge of upholding a staunch East-West dichotomy and producing the Other even in the most obvious Cold War setting. As another expellee visitor observed, it was not always easy to tell if on “a watchtower across [the border], Czech solders are patrolling [the land strip] or enjoying the beautiful area and air while sunbathing.”173 To reverse Homi Bhabha’s dictum, originally formulated with an eye to

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colonial mimicry, the border guards are portrayed as different but not quite.174 Instead of dissimilating the enemy’s sounds, Rudi’s ear picks up on little but echoes of the West. If travel writing is indeed a genre premised on negotiation between the discrete self and the Other, grounded in an “interplay between . . . difference and similarity,” Sudeten German borderland reports unsettle this bipartite structure.175 Their subversion of convention was, in all likelihood, an inadvertent consequence of their authors’ split allegiances rather than a concerted search for reciprocity. The writers could not bring themselves to draw the fi nal line between East and West, and the proverbial revisionist notes of their pronouncements added to, rather than detracted from, the complexity of their authors’ entanglements. It may seem paradoxical, but Sudeten German travelers to the Iron Curtain hesitated to locate the unknown, foreign, or unfamiliar on just one side—eastern side—of the divide. This inability is astonishing given the context in which they moved about and wrote. Indeed, Cold War tensions, one imagines, ought to have facilitated “reinstating a fi rm sense of differences . . . between cultures, regions, and ethnicities,” characteristic of travel more generally.176 The confl ict’s key vocabulary—containment, spheres of influence, bipolarity—reflected a relational dynamic in which the enemy was clearly visible and identifiable. The Iron Curtain, furthermore, cast the self/Other division in geographical terms. And yet, as the borderland reports communicate, Heimat was not “Eastern” or foreign enough, and the West, as one visitor put it, not sufficiently home-like.177 As a result, the East was reproachable but not irredeemable. Since Daphne Berdhl’s pathbreaking study, the image of westerners “gaz[ing] down on and ponder[ing] the otherness of the East” has gained broad acceptance in studies of the East-West encounter on the ground. In Maren Ullrich’s words, already in the second decade of the confl ict Western visitors at the inter-German border positioned themselves as outsiders facing “the other Germany.”178 Sudeten German travelogues, in contrast, unhinge the stark opposition between East and West. Even if unintentionally, they effect an approximation between the two. As we have seen, neither the era’s bipolar mindset, already called into question by scholars, nor the journeys’ divisive destination, succeeded in casting these writings as documents of little but the bloc mentalities.179 Instead of cementing an unambiguous separation between East and West, Sudeten German accounts of borderland travel muddled it. The reports attested that even those who thought of themselves as staunch anticom-

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munists failed to mobilize an all-out stance against the East and, by extension, confi rmed that border zones often engender attitudes “that do not occur in the same way outside them.”180 Finally, what kind of tourists were the Sudeten Germans? Were they “conscious and systematic seeker[s] of . . . a new and different experience, of the experience of difference and novelty,” to adopt Zygmunt Baumann’s classic defi nition?181 Were they, instead, primarily interested in recuperating the comfort of the familiar? Or rather, how familiar was the familiar if at stake was a landscape starkly altered by the descent of the Iron Curtain? These questions are difficult to answer with certainty. The Sudeten Germans’ recurrent returns to the border suggest that they did not conceive of their trips as either once-in-a-lifetime adventures or visits to a sensationalist “site [turned] into a sight.”182 At the same time, however, the border—including the no man’s land and the adjacent landscape to the east of it—remained changeable enough to secure novelty as the journeys’ lasting determinant. It was probably not the kind of novelty that Baumann had in mind. People who came back to the Czechoslovak–West German border year after year were not in the same boat with those who made their way to Paris, Madrid, or Rome. They did not sign up for what we term an “escape”—and anyway, escape would have hardly been an appropriate term to describe a vacation at the Iron Curtain. Instead, for them, novelty had the tempered quality of detecting differences in degree rather than kind. Participants in borderland trips compared and contrasted not just East and West—they compared and contrasted the East and West familiar from the past to their present appearance. The link to the past— the lineage with which this chapter opened—determined both their experiences and the ensuing narratives. As novel as Sudeten German borderland mobility and its chronicles may appear, they sprung from the same source as German tourism at large—Heimat.183 To this source they returned, time and again. As the following chapter elaborates, they returned fi rst and foremost to look.

Chapter Four

Uses Visual Nostalgia at the Prayer Wall Beyond “the Gaze”: Nostalgic Bifocalism

A

s early as 1951, a popular expellee newspaper foreshadowed the prayer wall’s visual horizons in a tribute to a recently departed reader. The deceased, as the fairy-tale opening of the article foretold, was neither a Sudeten German political functionary nor a cultural activist. Instead, she was reclusive Bohemian Forest blueblood, rather ill at ease in her new West German abode. An ethereal, dollhouse-like setting framed the twilight of her life. In a little Bavarian village Haidlfi ng near Landau on the Isar, in a little tiny room lived the grandniece of the writer Adalbert Stifter, Miss Emma Stifter, together with her sister . . . and brother-in-law. Time and again, across the endless, flat meadows and fields her glances (Blicke) would seek out the Bavarian Forest, which rims the view’s remote silhouette on clear days. And soon enough, the Bohemian Forest with Oberplan, Adalbert Stifter’s birthplace, would come up in her nostalgic dream images of home.1

This implied window into sixty-one-year-old Emma’s diminutive world gives us a preview of the practices to which we shall soon turn. Growing out of the infrastructure mapped in chapter 3, they further broadened the meaning of the prayer wall beyond religion alone. In the above snippet of Emma’s life, the reader glimpses not only a still life punctuated by portentous, if piecemeal keepsakes from the woman’s pre- expulsion past: her great uncle’s extreme unction cross, the key to his tomb, a few photographs, half a manuscript page, and, fi nally, a “large

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and heavy leather trunk.” There is, as the text intimates, much more to look at than the assortment of eerie objects crowding the shrunken enclosure. R. Adolph, the author behind the commendation and an avid contributor to several expellee periodicals, directs the reader’s mental eye outward. 2 Above all, the glimpse of Emma’s last days retrieves faraway vistas. It does so by referencing the visual pastimes of Adalbert Stifter’s characters, familiar from chapter 3, and, as we will discover shortly, of the realist classic himself. Itinerant glances dominate Adolph’s piece to identify a bifocal structure of the borderland’s visual economy, fundamental to this chapter’s discussion. The dyad does not simply reflect the “binary system” of Cold War culture—“East and West, encirclement and containment, . . . escalation and détente.”3 It captures two kinds of looking as they would be practiced just to the west of the border in Europe’s midst. While contouring the faint outlines of the Bavarian Forest as a virtual gateway into the inaccessible Bohemian woods, Adolph picks up on a disconnect between vision (Blick) and image (Bild). In his narrative of Emma’s experience, the act of looking and its final outcome are two opposed phenomena nevertheless joined in a kind of dialectical unity. In the manner evocative of the slippage between seeing and remembering, prominent in Reipirch’s report from chapter 3, Emma’s glance fails to maintain the focus on the visible. Contrary to the maxim, “We only see what we look at,” her glances recuperate that which could not be seen.4 They culminate in dreamy mental images that would eventually supplant the actual impressions of the landscape in front of her. On her mind is “the Heimat of memory,” a phantom that haunted many German expellees. 5 The circuitous route to it was, however, specific to Sudeten Germans. To fathom this elusive corner of the world, Emma could not just close her eyes and daydream. The path to reverie lay through her retina, for only actual looking across the Cold War divide spurred her imagination. Such codependence between physical vision and memory/fantasy was not unique to Stifter’s grandniece alone. It conditioned the way thousands of her Sudeten German compatriots looked and determined what they saw. For them—the only expellees with a view of their former Heimat—vision stood at the beginning of imaginative recollection. This chapter examines the bifocal pattern and tells the story of how secular extensions of the prayer wall reinforced its order. Emma’s way of looking blurred the line between human interior and

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exterior, between past and present. The following pages ask about the conditions, mental and environmental, that facilitated the collapse of such distinctions. Still more importantly, they describe the impact that this process had on reflections of the Iron Curtain in two very different but equally widespread middlebrow forms: amateur poetry and vernacular photography. How did these representations deal with the tension between the two above registers, one anchored to the immaterial and the other to the tangible? What did this tension mean for the visual economy of the Cold War borderlands, on as much as off the page? The Iron Curtain’s traditional iconography placed watchtowers and barbed wire in the foreground to suggest that the border quickly became a fortification impossible to overlook. And yet, as the introduction to this book has indicated, the picture of Continental division would be neither complete nor differentiated were it composed of the confl ict’s token signifiers alone. What else was in the eye of the beholder to the border’s immediate west? How was the physical space adapted to such an individual’s visual concerns? What place did the East occupy in them? We can dwell on these questions because Sudeten German homeland leaflets uniquely singled out an array of visual practices in the borderlands. They deployed the resulting nomenclature to categorize such habits and secure their continuity for decades to come. If landscape is indeed an invention, an “effect of looking” rather than its physical precondition, then the ensuing system certainly helped invent a Cold War landscape on the Iron Curtain’s western side.6 The “look into the Heimat” (Blick in die Heimat), as Emma Stifter’s occupation would soon become known among her compatriots, was the fi rst term that loomed large in Sudeten German deliberations of vision and its discontents. This expression translated a human faculty into a specific “social fact” that we recognize as visuality, setting the parameters in which looking would become meaningful in the Cold War borderlands.7 As in other instances discussed throughout this book, Heimat was its important yet not exclusive emphasis. Anything but a casual glance cast in passing or a curious “tourist gaze,” during the confl ict, the “look into the Heimat” evolved into a regulated practice inseparable from the Iron Curtain that it registered but ultimately sought to overcome. The intensity conveyed by the preposition “into,” rather than “at” (auf), suggested an act of trespassing and dramatized looking as a physical challenge. It insinuated that this particular visual modality had to do with the depth of field rather than the surface, with peeling back the

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landscape’s multiple layers rather than halting at the fortifications in the foreground. In the more remote past, lay beholders rarely theorized such acts— which is to say, many looked but few spoke or wrote about the specifics of the visual activity itself.8 Yet, things changed around the midtwentieth century, when surveillance and propaganda machines worked in full throttle, compelling millions to adopt the dominant viewpoint or, alternatively, stake out their own in opposition. Sudeten Germans pondered their position consistently, albeit far from self-critically. They scarcely heeded vision’s political implications for the wishful recuperation of their lost lands. But they tirelessly described, typologized, and embedded it on location. Coevals of the growing theoretical interest in seeing and being seen, these expellees developed a concise taxonomy of their visuality as early as the confl ict’s fi rst decade. The classification, in line with Emma Stifter’s experience, had two parts. There was, on the one hand, the aforesaid physical “look into the Heimat,” here used interchangeably with “vision.” On the other hand, there was a mental counterpart, the idealized “image of the Heimat” (Bild der Heimat), here alternately identified as the “image.”9 Much more than a quaint bluestocking from a bygone era, Emma Stifter both modeled and, by way of her lineage, legitimated this system, so that Adolph’s adoption of her figure was among the fi rst steps toward the canonization of the bifocal structure. And indeed, soon enough, West German ethnographers would hail the “look into the Heimat” as an unparalleled contribution of the expellees from the former Sudetenland to the new ritual developments in and beyond postwar Germany. It was, if one were to believe Schroubek, their “veritable innovation”—a claim that this chapter seeks to test.10 Along with religion, vision became another powerful consolidating force behind the prayer wall. Practitioners of the “look into the Heimat” went to great lengths to ensure the custom’s regular—yearly, monthly, sometimes even daily—recurrence. For its sake alone, many were willing to traverse the country for only a weekend or even a few hours, substantiating their efforts in countless reports and poems. “I had the great, infi nite fortune/I could see the Heimat again!” gushed the aspiring lyricist Adolf Böhm in a reminiscence of his visit around 1953. Summing up the point of the trip, he intimated the obvious: “From Bavaria’s borderland I looked/at its forests and hills.”11 The thrill of such encounters had a lasting power: as late as 1986, Böhm’s peer, Annie Götz-Kollmer, opened

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her own rhyme with a similarly excited “Here you can see the Heimat/ the Heimat!”12 In some cases, looking across the Iron Curtain was integral to people’s daily lives. Against all economic odds, hundreds of Sudeten Germans had settled down along the border, for no other reason than to be “close to their old Heimat in the Bohemian Forest and . . . look (einen Blick tun) into this lost Heimat now and then.”13 In Skalitzky’s words, travelers and residents alike “steadfastly turned in the same direction, toward the Bohemian Forest.” “Overcome by nostalgia,” he observed, some used trees as makeshift ladders to be able to see.14 Longing, as we will soon learn, played a decisive role in shaping the visual component of the prayer wall. As the mushrooming construction projects along the border suggest, it was the main reason for the increasing frequency of visits, not only in the 1950s, when many expellees still hoped to return to their former domiciles, but in the following decades as well. The object of this longing was anything but vague. While visitors in the late 1940s had appeared content with what they described as the “look into the general (allgemeine) Heimat,” by the early 1950s their nostalgia had grown to be “so overwhelming” that subduing it called for increasing local specificity.15 If during the confl ict’s early years expellees and locals still wandered about the landscape in search of the “best and most convenient viewing point,” before long they determined that only a few were satisfactory.16 Over time, this discovery produced a setting that made vision significantly less mobile than it had been initially. A characteristic paradox of the borderland visits was that the more the expellee poets rhymed “sehen” (to see) with “gehen” (to go), the less walking was involved. These fi xed locations would serve as additional building blocks for the prayer wall. The homeland leaflets spread the news about such elevations and in this way endorsed the new landmarks. Certainly, wrote one observer in 1951, the village where he had stayed overnight was lovely, but the outlying “hill offer[s] the viewer much more.”17 On the papers’ pages, potential visitors could fi nd out about such offerings in detail. With remarkable diligence, their compatriots listed anything from factory smokestacks and church spires in towns and hamlets, to lakes, forests, and fields on the outskirts. The imminent construction of lookout towers in Neualbenreuth (1961), Mähring (1973), and Stadlern (1983), or the renovation of existing facilities in such opportune locations as Bärnau, were, in this regard, but an extension of vision’s increasing yoking

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to place and its conscription to the prayer wall. Rather than appropriating existing structures, as the expellees did elsewhere in Germany,18 in the borderlands, Sudeten Germans emphasized the new projects that let them further shape the transformed landscape. Of course, the resulting buildings, the most elaborate of which are discussed in this chapter’s second half, served not only the expellees’ own ranks. In the words of one local administrator, they catered to “any guest” by “showing the border in plain sight.” Like comparable objects along the inter-German border, they “point[ed]” to the divide’s proverbial “inhumanity.”19 Yet, in contrast to just “any guests,” the area-savvy Sudeten German expellees looked beyond the border as well, suggesting, again, that the fortification was only partially recognizable. “A man’s hand,” commented one early observer, “has accomplished a lot, but until now it has not yet been capable of building a visible wall next to the invisible, so that to block [the] view” across. 20 At the Czechoslovak–West German border, looking through the Iron Curtain, rather than merely at it, was essential. This process, as the coda to chapter 3 points out, was irreducible to the production of difference or asymmetry—the telltale mechanisms at work in cementing Cold War polarities and, not coincidentally, the most widespread attributes of “the gaze” in a broad array of fields, from philosophy (Sartre) to psychoanalysis (Lacan), from poststructuralist social criticism (Foucault) to visual studies (Bryson). 21 It would, no doubt, be difficult to imagine the Cold War without surveillance, and it is certainly not what this chapter sets out to accomplish. Without question, being under “the gaze” counted among the most visceral Iron Curtain experiences for all parties involved—and quite a few Sudeten German sources, written and photographic, are witness to that. This chapter’s proposition, however, is that vision in the confl ict’s borderlands stood not only for “the gaze,” usually described as a violent, organized, divisive, and controlling technical apparatus rather than a human faculty per se. The dyad of the look into the Heimat and the Heimat’s mental image, best described as nostalgic bifocalism, belonged to a different register altogether. This had to do with vision’s stratified social function, which commonly entails “various activities of seeing—looking, observing, spectating, surveying.” Even “looking,” the term adopted here for its relatively neutral meaning, “is not a single activity at all.”22 The Cold War context was no exception. It spurred ways of seeing that took on highly specific forms even if they had sprung from earlier models. Nostalgic bifocalism counted among them. Its analysis in this chapter draws attention to the

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kinds of physical settings and related written sources that put pressure on the stark East/West dichotomies, structurally predicated on the dynamic of “the gaze.” In the Cold War, such environments thrived especially among various émigrés, refugees, or expellees from the Eastern Bloc. These individuals and collectives, the striking historical and circumstantial differences among them notwithstanding, professed allegiance to both sides of the East-West divide. Along the Czechoslovak–West German border, the guest books at the chapels and towers of the prayer wall contained entries from Czechs as well as from Germans expelled from Silesia: two other groups who frequented the barrier to “pine for (and look at) the places over there” (sehnen [sehen] uns nach drüben). 23 Looking across the divide did not immediately grant these visitors the role of detached outsiders or alienated Western observers. For those with Eastern pasts, borderland impressions did not simply add up to a “hierarchical system” in which freedom unequivocally equaled the West, and the lack thereof, the East. 24 Much like the so-called Wall-lookers, or Mauerkieker— Berliners who in the early 1960s sought a glimpse of friends, family, or the city on the other side of the Wall—these nostalgics held on to the places across the divide. Nostalgic bifocalism captured the complexity of their contradictory investments.

The Nostalgic Imperative The above juxtaposition of seeing and longing (sehen and sehnen), in German only one letter apart, highlights nostalgia’s importance in shaping the visual environment along the Iron Curtain. And, indeed, longing is anything but synonymous with blindness or myopia. Modernity’s signature litmus test, it often outs itself as “a kind of sightfulness” born out of the metaphorical “regime of seeing” specific to its era. 25 But let us take this observation a step further. Along the Cold War suture, nostalgia was not only a product of the figurative viewpoint, it was the force behind real-life vantage points of the kind identifiable on the map—the map of the prayer wall. Understood as a tradition with respectable antecedents, on the roster of which Emma’s famed forefather held a place of honor, longing focused borderland visuality at the Iron Curtain. More than a vague “emotional upheaval,” it paved the way to the expellee bifocalism and determined

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the scope of its physical effects on the landscape to the border’s west. 26 Nostalgia’s overlooked visual thrust funneled civilian construction projects in the area, accentuating and, at the same time, mitigating the Cold War divide. Situating nostalgia in the Cold War borderlands became a priority early on. As a Sudeten German clergyman put it in the early 1980s, starting in the late 1940s his countrymen could no longer make do with the “old yellowing photographs of Heimat.” 27 The family album was too cramped a space to house nostalgia. The visual regime of the latter, most expellees conceded, could flourish only on location. “Sudeten German love for their Heimat is great; many . . . expellees come to look into the Heimat (einen Blick in die Heimat zu tun) from all over the Federal Republic, sometimes even from America,” enthused a contributer to Der Sudetendeutsche, the most widely circulated non-partisan Sudeten German weekly between 1949 and 1958. 28 The question remained whether the family album—the real thing or the mental archive fi lled with memories of familiar places—should be brought along. In other words, should the projection of place memories onto the actual landscape, à la Emma Stifter, be encouraged or not? This was a point of considerable disagreement between dreamers, on the one hand, and realists, on the other. Let us briefly review their differences, which the secular additions to the prayer wall would fi rst negotiate and then erase. Those in the dreamer category, which included Stifter’s grandniece, insisted that “the [original] image of the Heimat will never . . . fade” and ought to be preserved in its temporally arrested condition. Fusing fairytale Sleeping Beauty imagery with elements of the Cold War setting, they marveled that it was even possible “to pull back a corner of the large and seemingly impervious curtain and look at [the] currently dormant Egerland.” 29 In 1949, the editors of the second issue of Der Sudetendeutsche asserted that, for expellees from all walks of life, “the image of the Heimat is perpetual remembrance.” The dreamers, the author continued, “have brought along some landscape paintings, so that old people could reminisce and the young people learn what home looked like.”30 But purists found even paintings to be superfluous. Why bother with them, one of them asked in 1951, if images of Heimat are already “indelibly etched onto our soul [so that] neither time nor distance could blur them”?31 Retrieving such etchings, however, was no simple operation. It required both looking and imagining. “Just like Adam and Eve,”

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anticipated an editor of one expellee newsletter in 1953, “through the blur in our eyes we will longingly look over at the places of our childhood, and what the eye cannot see through the binoculars will arise inside us vividly and almost tangibly.”32 This sentiment proved resilient: as late as 1983, the Sudeten German activist Anton Lehnerl would proclaim at a yearly borderland gathering that “in our hearts we carry the image of our Heimat just as it was before we left.”33 Those who dreamed in verse, however, could not help but divulge the difficulty of ignoring the slippage between image and vision. Composing a fluid whole, rather than piecing together snippets of impressions, as many reports did, exposed seeing with the mind’s eye as an impossible ambition. Josef Weitzer, a well-known dialect poet and genealogist from the Egerland, was one of those who grappled with this challenge. His “Longing for Heimat” (Heimat-Sehnen), written in High German, appeared in 1964, the year when Czechoslovakia opened its borders to Western tourists and thus permitted Sudeten German expellees to visit their former Heimat. 34 Weitzer’s text therefore reads as a timely expression of the tension between Heimat seen and Heimat remembered, vision and image, seeing and longing. In it, the lyrical “I” represents the expellees who cannot yet travel and see for themselves—a sizeable fraction of Weitzer’s readership. Consequently, the nagging desire to do so permeates the fi rst two verses. In the fi rst stanza especially, the alliterative moaning of einmal (once), meinem (mine), möchte (would like to), and nochmal (once again) echoes the phonemes of Heimat itself to communicate the urgency of longing: Just once more in my life I’d like to see my Heimat, I’d like to walk the paths of my childhood once again! Since I’ve been expelled, a steady pain gnaws on me; all my longing, all my thinking is since then Heimat-bound. [Noch einmal in meinem Leben möcht’ ich meine Heimat sehn,

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möchte gerne alle Wege meiner Kindheit nochmals gehn! Seit man mich aus ihr vertrieben, nagt in mir ein steter Schmerz; all mein Sehnen, all mein Sinnen gehet seitdem heimatwärts.]

Weitzer’s foremost rhyme of the fi rst stanza, sehn (to see) and gehn (to walk), to invoke Yuri Lotman’s observation, is not just “a conjunction of two separate utterances, but . . . two modes of saying the same thing.”35 Seeing, as Weitzer chooses to portray it, still possesses kinesis inseparable from walking. Transported by the motion of gehen, seeing and longing propel the speaker in his quest for Heimat and, with it, the flow of the poem. The futility of this search, however, condenses in Heimat’s emphatic absence at the end of the third stanza—a turning point that both invites the remaining three strophes and posits a stark contrast to them. Here, the structure of the poem depends on the introduction of a second speaker. This is a “friend” and the implied interlocutor of the lyrical “I,” to whom the latter reaches out: “Friend! You saw after all these years our Heimat as a guest. Say, how was it? Tell the truth, what is your impression? [Freund! Du sahst nach vielen Jahren unsre Heimat jetzt als Gast. Sag! Wie war es? Sag die Wahrheit, welchen Eindruck du nun hast?]

The friend’s answer describes Heimat as nothing but a razed landscape: “Our Heimat is in chains!/Wastelands lie wherever you look!” Ostensibly appalled, the fi rst speaker briskly fi lls the void with “The ever-beautiful image of the Heimat” that the “I” ought to “keep [in his] heart!” The blank surface of Weitzer’s wasteland becomes a projection surface for the arrested memory of Heimat. The term “impression,” in the end, captures both the dreary picture that the “friend” paints and Heimat’s indelible, near-photographic imprint in the expellee mind.

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Realists, in contrast to dreamers, soberingly assured that “the image of the Heimat as we, young or old, carry it in our hearts, no longer exists,” and therefore that it was not worth focusing on. 36 “My look traveled over the familiar hills,” wrote a disillusioned borderland visitor in 1964, “over villages and towns that lay so peaceful, close enough to touch. And yet the image was deceptive, since many a village harbors no more life.”37 “The things you see,” warned the well-known Sudeten German lyricist, Margarete Kubelka, in a poem titled “At the Bohemian Border,” “are no longer those/of which your nighttime dreams will know.” “I felt,” intoned her discouraged colleague, Ludwig Adler, in his “At the Border,” “that my image of the Heimat was from yesterday, not today or tomorrow.”38 In the words of Franz Reipirch, whose borderland report informed the previous chapter’s discussion, even if “outside things still looked the way we remembered, it has become a different world.”39 For this reason, one of his fellow countrymen admonished, “a Sudeten German should not merely carry an image of the Heimat in his heart and keep his [false] illusions alive; he has to know how the external image of the Heimat is changing.”40 No remedy suited this purpose better than physical vision— the sober “look into the Heimat.” Most Sudeten Germans concurred that, fi rst and foremost, they came to the border to look. Yet, in light of the division between dreamers and realists, there were vast differences between that which they had set out to see. Some sought to cherish their “dream images of home” and focus only on the familiar, adopting the “image of the Heimat” as their guiding light. Others, in contrast, dedicated themselves to change and embraced the “look into the Heimat” to zoom in on the region’s transformations. It is not that the former were less nostalgic than the latter; rather, they expressed their longing differently. A constant tension between their two viewpoints defi ned the borderlands’ visual economy for decades. As we shall see, it had its most immediate consequences for perceptions of the Iron Curtain as well. But fi rst, let us address the perpetuation of nostalgic bifocalism in poetry, fueled, once again, by the manupulation of the figure of Adalbert Stifter. In the 1950s, the author’s reframing as a quintessentially nostalgic poet of the Bohemian Forest facilitated the visual trajectory that adaptations of longing would follow just to the west of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, Stifter was not only the leading figure of Sudeten German politico-cultural aspirations in the wake of 1945, but also the undisputed authority on pinings and yearnings.41 Precisely the perceived

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preponderance of longing in Stifter’s biography and oeuvre—after all, his last painting had “Longing” as its title—propelled him into the ranks of postwar Sudeten German borderland patron saints in the waning 1940s.42 It was nostalgia (Heimweh), declared an expellee author of the aforementioned Heimat questionnaire from 1955, that “started to germinate in Stifter’s heart when he came to Kremsmünster as a young student, and it was nostalgia that lent him the energies to create [his novel] Witiko after years of preliminary drafting.”43 In the interwar years it was the professional writers and literary critics in Prague and on Bohemia’s periphery who celebrated Stifter as a “Sudeten German classic”; in the postwar years amateurs took over.44 The upswing in interest in him helped embed the nearly century-old yearnings for the forest’s preternatural, nationally coded beauty in the cleft landscape of Central Europe during the Cold War. Albeit a mere attribution, one of Stifter’s poems, reprinted in Marienbad-Tepler Heimatbrief in 1955, stood as proof of the nostalgic proclivity that the nineteenth-century “forest bard” had ostensibly passed down to his twentieth-century Sudeten German followers. In the absence of any editorial commentary, the poem ought to have communicated concerns that would have seamlessly aligned with the expellees’ own. Consequently, the lyrical “I”/eye occupied a vantage point strikingly similar to that of Emma Stifter and her expelled compatriots: Longingly here I sit, my eyes fi xed on the distance. Where the skies’ blue gently mingles with mountains dawns the welcoming country of the abandoned Heimat; over there the nebulous band, oh, I know it well, there soars the forest with which my Heimat begins. Luminous country of youth! If only I were there again! Oh, it was beautiful when the tree under which I played, father’s house, the home-like valley were my world. Here in faraway lands I will never be happy. [Sehnend sitze ich hier und hefte das Aug’ in die Ferne. Dort, wo des Himmels Blau sanft sich mit Bergen vermischt, dämmert das freundliche Land der verlassenen Heimat herüber, dorten der neblichte Streif, oh, ich erkenne ihn gut, dort ist hochaufragend der Wald, der die Heimat beginnet. Glänzendes Jugenland! wär’ ich doch wieder in dir!

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Oh, es war schön, da der Baum, worunter ich spielte, schön, da des Vaters Haus, schön, da das heimische Tal meine Welt war . . . Hier, im fernen Land, hier werde ich nimmermehr glücklich.]45

It was thus not an accident that the figure of Stifter is invoked in one of the earliest poems devoted to the complex dynamic of the “look into the Heimat.” Franz Lorenz, an amateur who published in the pages of Der Volksbote, introduces Stifter by setting the poem at the Great Osser peak, the old stomping ground of Stifter and his fictional characters.46 Like Tillen and Dreisessel, Osser was not simply another mountaintop from where Sudeten Germans would “let their eyes wander off to the [physically inaccessible] places,” as a local forester allegedly reported in 1948.47 If Lorenz’s poem opened with an unexpected “Thank you” to the mountain, it was because he made Osser stand tall as his text’s foremost animated character. Over the length of his eight stanzas that followed no clear stylistic pattern, each containing anywhere from three to eight lines, the peak personified a kobold-like figure. This “giant of the Bohemian Forest” possessed an impressive physique well familiar to readers of the area’s sagas, densely populated with such mythical folk. And yet, in 1952 Lorenz turned to these qualities not just to rekindle his compatriots’ interest in folklore, but also to grapple with the Cold War reality around him. Confronting this reality, as we shall see, required Stifter’s intervention. Lorenz cast Osser as a protagonist in his very own détente scenario. Only the peak’s “magisterially mighty (herrschgewaltig) fist,” according to the fi rst strophe, could lift (heben) the poet “over the narrow valleys,/ over the borders drawn by humans,/the death zone armored by watchtowers.” Such superhuman heights, Lorenz made clear, provided a symbolic venue for seeing not only Heimat, they were the poet’s chance to fathom division and ponder what it would take to overcome it. Out of concern for conveying peaceful intentions, Lorenz attempted to dissociate his coinage herrschgewaltig from the semantic ambiguity of its constituent parts, since both Herrschaft (rule) and Gewalt (violence or force) could have easily evoked either National Socialism or Communism. The poem suggests that Osser, on the contrary, derives its strength from a source outside any social form, let alone one that is deemed oppressive. Precisely for this reason, the mountain’s mighty (gewaltig), rather than violent (gewalttätig), fist is a manifestation of the “soft power” (sanfte

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Gewalt) capable of putting an end to the Continent’s fractured condition. Lorenz’s term resonates with Stifter’s concept of the “gentle law” (das sanfte Gesetz), which distilled morality from the workings of nature and permeated the classic’s forest-themed works. Lorenz, who would introduce Stifter’s coinage in one of the fi nal stanzas, ascribed its force to Osser’s anthropomorphic appendage—the antithesis of the iron fist.48 Osser’s stature, by this token, was reason enough to invoke Stifter’s name and place it at the core of the poem’s emphatic, almost prayerlike appeal. It is as if Lorenz’s lyrical “I” were a latter-day Moses ascending the mountain to receive a commandment from a literary demigod. It followed in the poem’s conclusion that only natural law, personified by Osser and disseminated by Stifter, could triumph over man-made Cold War doctrines. Described as a “keeper and witness of fate and future” in the concluding line, Osser makes it possible to look ahead with hope. To lead up to this revelation incrementally, Lorenz, like other expellee authors inspired by trips to the Iron Curtain, fi rst had to situate the “I” in the landscape. The standard for such openings had already been set by Johann Andreas Blaha in his poem “Look into the Heimat,” written in 1949. Blaha’s formula, a pared-down version of Stifter’s lyrical yearnings, sets up an uncomplicated causal relationship between location and visuality: “I stood on a high mountain/and looked into the Heimat.”49 And although Lorenz adopts a similar mise-en-scène, it has none of Blaha’s matter-of-factness. Unfolding over the fi rst three stanzas, composed entirely in the past tense, Lorenz’s preamble makes clear that the mountaintop proffers anything but a “monarch-of-all-I-survey scene,” which is generally emblematic of western travel writing. 50 In the mutable Cold War landscape, the sense of control is slipping away fast. It is small wonder that Lorenz’s verses express none of the confidence that was pervasive in Sudeten German poems from the interwar period. Emil Magerl’s work is a case in point. “As I stood on a hill,” he wrote in 1930, “and looked across the wide Heimat—just as a falcon over the trees— / . . . I was rich/and equal to a king.”51 Whereas Magerl’s subject owns the starry skies and valleys around him, Lorenz’s appears to be a hesitant borrower of such riches. Here is why the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” model becomes untenable in the Cold War borderlands. Looking, according to Lorenz, is a challenge for several reasons. Even at the onset of the second strophe of the poem, where he begins to describe the visual act, the view remains obstructed despite the seemingly advantageous location. In order to see,

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the speaker needs, fi rst, to overcome a multiplicity of obstacles, recited in the anaphoric reiteration of “over” in the fi rst stanza’s lines. But even then, trespassing through the planes of hills, valleys, and fortifications does not suffice to catch a glimpse of the other side. Not until the verb heben (lift) appears again, this time in reference to the Iron Curtain, does the landscape in the East present itself. And even when it does, it is a stage event over which the lyrical “I” has little authority. A metaphor rather than a physical partition, in the fi rst two lines of the second strophe the Iron Curtain rises to reveal the ostensibly gruesome performance: And thus rose the Iron Curtain Of the cruel play on Europe’s stage . . . [Also hob sich der Eiserne Vorhang Grausamen Spiels auf der Bühne Europas . . .]

The clash between Lorenz’s turn of phrase and the accepted Cold War trope of the curtain’s fall, championed by Churchill only five years earlier, points to the confusion that aspiring literati, amateur or not, must have felt in the face of the new confl ict’s metaphors. Lorenz’s redesignation of the Iron Curtain as a theater curtain (rather than a mere safety device), widespread in subsequent Western representations of the confl ict’s symbol, underscores his attempt to visualize the barrier on associative terms. 52 His reference to a Spiel, likewise, harbors unstable meanings. It alternately denotes a child’s play, theater performance, or war games, adding to the unstable nature of the spectacle about to take place. The sole character to appear on Lorenz’s improvised stage compounds this polysemy: “Heimat I saw,” the “I” declares at long last, “an orphaned Heimat.” Yet even when Heimat lies there, abandoned, taking possession of it is not any easier. It is because this “orphan’s” presence manifests itself in paradoxical ways. Each manifestation defies the senses and becomes an obstacle to the poet’s urge to adopt Heimat, even if only with his eyes. Lorenz staggers the lines to convey that one can no longer hear, see, or smell that which had once made this landscape a home. One fi nds, at fi rst sight, recognizable “villages and farms, nestled against the woods,” but no smoke arises from their “sacred stoves.” No farmer, Lorenz laments, tills the land (pflügte kein Bauer); no countrywoman’s voice resounds across the

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valley (nirgendwo lockte der Bäuerin Ruf), and no church bells can be heard ringing. Lorenz’s irregular patches of dactylic tetrameters and his stern blank verse lend the second stanza an epic quality that somberly reflects the negative sensory experience. This is where nostalgia comes into play, as only it can reinstate the “I’s” access to Heimat. To fi ll the above sensory vacuum, in the fi rst line of the third strophe the “I” succumbs to longing (Sehnsucht), in order “to see still more of the delightful Heimat.” The poem’s bifocalism thus pivots on what can be described as a nostalgic imperative—that is, the urge to access a familiar yet distant locale by way of the senses, vision in particular. By bringing about such exposure, nostalgia acts a catalyst that expedites the moment of crisis. Without this moment, the poet would ultimately fail to dispel the sense of gloom, reinstate hope, and enforce the procession of the contrived image from physical vision. Let us see how the crisis point comes about. Increased proximity, as it turns out, only disappoints the eye’s acquisitive thrust, expressed by the adverbial “still more.” We fi nd out that, just as the “I” “approached the border marker” (näher dem Grenzstein trat), he “saw a sentry on an enemy tower/Fumble for his machine gun.” As with heben (to lift) earlier, sehen (to see) also recurs twice, and its second appearance calls the fi rst into question. The earlier “Heimat I saw” becomes an experience overwritten or even negated by a new encounter, “I saw the sentry.” Along the border, the “look into the Heimat” teeters on the verge of being subverted (the poem underscores this in terms uncannily reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s observations in his 1943 work Being and Nothingness). As a result, the “I” can no longer claim the elevated position staked out in the poem’s opening. Culminating when the speaker takes note of the Czechoslovak guard, the text submits to a structure reminiscent of a dramatic piece, with an exposition in the fi rst strophe, rising action in the second, climax in the third and fourth, falling action in the fi fth, and denouement in the fi nal two. The end of the third stanza concurrently signals a turning point in the poem’s representation of vision in the Cold War borderlands. To the hitherto physical “look into the Heimat,” in the fourth strophe Lorenz adds a metaphysical dimension. In order to recuperate the act of looking just thwarted by the sense of being observed, he delegates Osser as a mediator between the earthly and the divine. The mountain’s height, a source of purely physical strength at the poem’s beginning, now justifies Osser’s

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intercessory position as an authority to which the poet can entrust his Cold War anxieties. Anticipating the West German poets’ preoccupation with Cold War themes, Lorenz dwells on one of the era’s keywords— annihilation (Vernichtung). Yet, just like Ernst Bartl (see chapter 1), he needs to explain what the fear of annihilation means to him and his Sudeten German fellow countrymen. As in Bartl’s case, the scope of their apprehension is distinct from the period’s dominant angst. In what way? Some years later, in 1964, Gudrun Ensslin and Bernward Vesper would publish their pathbreaking anthology Against Death (Gegen den Tod), which collected the voices of the established West German literati of the Cold War era. The outcome left few doubts that dismay about the nuclear future was the dominant angst of those years. Albeit more cautiously than their West German peers, American Cold War poets of the early to mid-1950s likewise touched on the bomb as the key source of anxiety. 53 Lorenz and his pen-wielding colleagues, in contrast, saw the Continent’s partition as the potential beginning of the end. Destruction, they suggested, would come not from the atom, it would begin with the border instead. And Heimat, they found, could be easily woven into the fabric of such trepidations, as Lorenz’s fourth strophe confi rms: Kindhearted Osser, the mighty peak, You who converse with God, the destiny’s captain, through the clouds, Announce to us whether the Heimat is lost forever, Whether this death at human borders Is forever our sentence to fi nal annihilation! [Gütiger Osser, mächtiger Gipfel, Der Du durch Wolken hindurch Zwiesprache hältst mit Gott, dem Lenker des Schicksals, Künd’ uns, ob uns die Heimat für immer verloren, Ob dieser Tod an Menschen-Grenzen Ewiges Urteil letzter Vernichtung!]

In contrast to the despondent streak of the period’s canonical works— the poems by Stephan Hermlin or Marie-Luise Kaschnitz, included in Against Death—Lorenz’s plea, the fi fth strophe makes obvious, is heard without delay. It is here that Stifter’s name is fi nally mentioned:

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Behold! The clouds leaden with gray ripped open; And the heavenly sun’s luminous hand Showed the idealized Heimat of the poet . . . Adalbert Stifter. [Siehe! Da rissen die grau-schweren Wolken; Himmlischer Sonne Strahlenhand Zeigte verklärend die Heimat des Dichters . . . Adalbert Stifter.]

A deus-ex-machina gesture replaces the bleak view of the orphaned Heimat with an outlook on Adalbert Stifter’s sunlit birthland. The melodious vocalism and the forward-looking reference of the deictic siehe (behold), the word inaugurating the transformation, distinguish the verb both phonetically and semantically from the earlier [ich] sah ([I] saw), where the low vowel pointed back to the past. At once an interjection and a command, siehe puts the nostalgic imperative into its proper grammatical form. The shortest sentence in the entire poem, it is also the fi rst to presuppose an open-ended addressee. Whereas earlier forms of direct, second-person address targeted Osser exclusively to highlight various aspects of its mythical strength, here, for the fi rst time, the implied pronoun leaves room for the reader as well. The result of this new act of looking is, likewise, qualitatively other. The clouds part to reveal an idealized landscape, the path to which Lorenz paves with such neologisms as grau-schwer (heavy with gray) and Strahlenhand (hand of rays). The poet sketches a visual process that parallels Emma Stifter’s experience. Once again, fantasy replaces reality, and the physical “look into the [orphaned] Heimat” gives way to the idealized “image of the Heimat.” By adopting the inclusive “Siehe!” the poem makes this process available to more than just one individual. It issues a prescription to averting two crises—one internal and poetic, the other external and political. Whereas the fi nal accords of the fi rst four strophes convey death (Tod), suffering (Leid), and annihilation (Vernichtung), Siehe! anticipates the possibility of vanquishing such fears in a détente of Lorenz’s own making. The impetus for their ultimate transcendence, from the poet’s viewpoint, will come not from Osser but from the next second-person addressee. Reintroduced in the two penultimate stanzas, the informal Du (you) refers to Stifter himself. Lorenz’s synopsis of the writer’s work emulates the syntax and vocabulary of Stifter’s prose and presumes the

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reader’s considerable familiarity with the classic’s style. The poem alludes in particular to Stifter’s prologue to his collection Bunte Steine (Colored Stones, 1853), in which he laid out his understanding of smallness and greatness and foregrounded their procession from nature to humans. As if to reflect such a sequence of steps, Lorenz sets up a procession of his own. In the two penultimate strophes, Lorenz’s pronouns progress from “you” to “I” and, eventually, “we.” They thus not only synthesize Stifter’s “gentle law,” but also establish a community of its contemporary recipients—a community the outlines of which Lorenz leaves appropriately vague. They could include the expellees, Germans, Central Europeans, or all Cold War contemporaries: You, who in the greatness and vigor of forests, As much as in the smallest among leaves, moths, and flowers, Recognized equal laws of divine creation, The soft power of the eternal will, The ordering force of the divine Judge! Well, so I believe That we, living according to this law, Will overcome the terror, the hostility of death . . . [Der Du in Größe und Wucht der Wälder Wie im Kleinsten der Blätter, Falter und Blumen Gleiche Gesetzte göttlicher Schöpfung erkannt, Sanfte Gewalt des Ewigen Willens, Ordnende Macht des göttlichen Richters . . .! Ja, nun glaub’ ich, Daß wir, lebend nach diesem Gesetze, Überwinden das Grauen, die Feinschaft des Todes . . .]

While Lorenz, as Stifter, has little to say about how exactly this community ought to turn such commandments into practicable law, his text’s emphasis is that the hopeful note upon which the poet concludes matters more than any specific prescription. Cold War–era nostalgia, Lorenz’s lines suggest, must face not only the past but also the uncertain future. For this purpose, longing depends on an adequate vantage point from which it can proceed equally to the East and to the West, backward as

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well as forward in time. Lorenz’s choice of Osser as the poem’s location suggests that such a vantage point is not only poetic or imagined but also geographical. In the following section, we will consider the real-life transpositions of such nostalgic vantage points onto the Cold War borderlands, where the expellees’ proverbial “obsession with nostalgic Heimat elements” received its physical foundation. 54

The Revised Conventions of Tourist Flashbacks Most frequently, these vantage points were captured in photographs. Yet there was a considerable difference between the casual snapshots of West German natives and Sudeten German expellees. It had to do both with what was pictured and how. To outline the contrast in brief, let us open a small gray photo album. Some time around July 1960 an unidentified West German family purchased it to document their Bavarian Forest vacation that month. Its unevenly fi lled pages showcase the usual scrapbook trappings: dutifully collected cabin receipts, sugar-cube wrappers from local bakeries and pensions, and railway tickets. They also display an array of postcards of local landmarks. We see primeval forests and waterfalls in Höllbachspreng; traditional wooden memorial boards around nearby Falkenstein; the state border atop Osser; an avalanche shelter on a nearby peak, Lusen; views of the mountains and lakes around Arber; and various highlights of Passau. Interspersed are blackand-white photographs taken by the vacationers themselves (fig. 21). About half of these are images of West German towns, villages, or landscapes—Zwiesel, a hub of glass-blowing industries where the family must have started the journey; Passau; Bayerisch-Eisenstein; Bodenmais; and, again, Osser, Arber, and Lusen. The rest show family members riding ski lifts; posing on mountaintops, at lakes or waterfalls; and smiling, as one caption explained, “happily, even in the rain.” Their expressions are integral to the story of a successful getaway, and there is hardly a picture that does not show its subjects en face. As many other tourist photographs, these pictures “provide evidence—that you have been away, that the mountains were that high, that the weather was so good.”55 This rather typical tourist photo album merits a mention here because Sudeten Germans tended to compose their photographic memories of borderland trips or pilgrimages quite differently. First and most obvious, Sudeten Germans frequently opted to make their photographs

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figure 21. A page from a West German family photo album. From Bayerischer Wald Urlaub Juli 1960, author’s personal collection.

public. Although countless snapshots undoubtedly remained archived in the homes of expellees, just as frequently the homeland leaflets played the part of albums open to anyone’s perusal. Occasionally, the disseminated snapshots would be used to illustrate an accompanying report about an individual’s or a group’s travels. Otherwise, the images might just appear out of context, wherever the leaflet’s layout permitted, oftentimes with no caption, or just a very brief one. Second, the subject matter of expellees’ photographs was commonly not the landscape at all, which, as a rule, is unidentifiable to the outside viewer—in contrast to the BBP’s photographs, where the view (Blick) was often a sweeping areal panorama, captured with a telephoto lens, of the various border fortifications. 56 For the most part, expellee photographs were not about conquest of, or mastery over, recognizable vast or spectacular vistas— often the case with tourist photography. Instead, nondescript fields or forest clearings, found all over Central Europe, predominated. 57 Some

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images included border turnpikes, shut-down crossings, or Eastern Bloc watchtowers (fig. 22), but even these required further identification. In the Cold War borderlands, anamnesis, or the recognition of the familiar, rarely took place without a commentary. But, most importantly, these photographs do not concern themselves with visitors’ faces or expressions, especially not with the kind of frontal portrayals that would lend irrefutable evidence to the fact that the person pictured had been there. Instead, these images focused on the act of looking as such. They captured the “look into the Heimat” not as a fleeting blink of an eye, but as a lasting and thorough contemplation. While it is possible that they reference the German Romantic tradition epitomized in Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, such allusions are by no means literal. The difference arises not only from the choice of medium. Unlike the Romantic works, the expellee photographs of “the look into the Heimat” focused on their subjects’ gestures by positioning their protagonists sideways or with their backs toward the viewer. While looking at Heimat was a theme of Sudeten German photography as early as the interwar period, only in the Cold War era did gesture evolve into its central motif. 58 What follows is a commentary on this shift of emphasis. A snapshot of the Koch family at “the threshold (Schwelle) to Heimat” is an example of this kind of image (fig. 23). With the exception of one

figure 22. “Look into the Heimat at the Tilly Earthworks.” From EZ 13, no. 5 (August 1962): 211. Courtesy of Egerer Landtag e. V.

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figure 23. “The Koch family with the car at the threshold to the Heimat, Easter 1960.” From EZ 12, no. 9 (August 1961): 87. Courtesy of Egerer Landtag e. V.

boy, who turns to look into the camera, the frame depicts several generations of a family staggered in close succession, bending their elbows at identical angles and pointing binoculars in the same direction. Although the family’s threshold location evokes a rite of passage—the liminal moment that occurs on the eve of crossing yet another boundary—the picture’s emphasis on vision signals the contrary. Looking turns out to be but a substitute for physical crossing, and the subjects caught in the act are immobile. To engage the audience, the image’s keepers relied not only on composition. To reinforce the direction of the look, the vanishing point of which would have been difficult for an outside observer to detect, one of the family members drew an arrow pointing to a specific place on the horizon line. A violation of photography’s medial boundaries, the pencil mark stakes out Heimat’s most exact coordinates. The arrow, however, identifies not only the place but also the moment associated with the photograph. To explain this, the caption draws attention to the specific instance in which the picture was taken: “To the left of Altkinsberg [Starý Hroznˇatov, a Czech village across from Waldsassen] is the yellow

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chimney of the Erl factory, its dense smoke was just rising over the building.” Deixis—“the location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context”—is thus an element that singularly defi nes this and other Sudeten German photographs of the “look into the Heimat.”59 It preserves the images’ expressive potential by substituting gestures for facial expressions. What does the deictic thrust achieve? By debunking the conventions of tourist portraiture, it puts vanity on the back burner. Instead, it creates and regulates a space between the photographed subjects and the viewer, who may have never visited the location. Intersubjectivity is the pivot of spatial deixis, verbally expressed by the demonstrative here/ there and especially significant for communicating the visual experience of the borderland as more than just the experience of the border alone. The signpost gesture, like no other, allows the physical markers of space to enter representation, linguistic or pictorial. Moreover, it casts “the role of the sender as distinct from the role of the receiver,” as Karl Bühler, a pioneer of deixis research, has pointed out. The resulting space between them, the “deictic field,” is where the otherwise empty signifiers acquire their context-specific meaning.60 This meaning is indispensable for drawing the audience into the picture and helping it envision what lies beyond the Iron Curtain. To this end, in the Sudeten German snapshots, deixis is often embodied. First and foremost, it persists in the signpost gesture itself. The latter, Bühler remarks, remains a markedly resilient physical attribute: “although the index fi nger,” as “the natural tool of ocular demonstration, may well be replaced by other deictic clues . . . , the assistance it and its equivalents provide can never completely cease and simply be dispensed with.” Therefore, the term “indication” is always figurative and literal at the same time.61 Through the lens of Bühler’s writings, Sudeten Germans’ photographs of the “look into the Heimat” turn out to be doubly indexical—fi rst, in gestural content, and second, in their medium. If an indexical deficit plagued the efforts of Sudeten Germans to chronicle Cold War ruins in the Eastern Bloc, as we saw in chapter 1, the photographs of the “look into the Heimat,” in contrast, swell with an indexical surplus. They not only point to their real-world referents, but also employ the signpost gesture to infuse the snapshots with corporeal momentum. The signpost gesture took center stage on numerous such images re-

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figure 24. “Plan is visible to a naked eye.” From HbPW 18, no. 215 (July 1966): 580. Courtesy of Verlag Heimatbrief für die Kreise Plan-Weseritz und Tepl-Petschau.

produced in the expellee press throughout the Cold War. It became particularly pervasive in the 1960s, when borderland travel approached its peak years. Thus, on a medium shot of men and women in profi le captioned “Plan [Planá] is visible with a naked eye” (1966), a pointing hand stretches from the center of the image across to the right, so that its extended index fi nger contrasts starkly with the pale sky (fig. 24). Next to another image of a group of Egerlanders looking across a field (fig. 25), a caption underscores a similar signpost gesture with a deictic pronoun. “Heimat is there” (Dort ist die Heimat), it promises. The promise, however, goes unfulfi lled for the reader of the leaflet where the picture appears. In real-life deixis, the hand ought to serve as “a sort of guide rope that only needs to be followed to fi nd something present in the concrete . . . situation.”62 Yet, on most expellee photographs, precisely this is the function in which the gesture fails, as Heimat usually lies outside the photograph. Whereas the act of looking is always in plain sight, its objects are often obscured. How, then, can the viewer of such images compensate for this absence? Bühler’s answer is to outline two deictic modalities evocative of

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figure 25. “Heimat is there.” From EZ 13, no. 16 (August 1962): 223. Courtesy of Egerer Landtag e. V.

Emma Stifter’s experience. First, he singles out “ocular demonstration,” which points to the visible. Second, he identifies “imagination-oriented deixis,” which ushers in the invisible. In this register, “the narrator,” Bühler expounds from his linguistic vantage point, leads the hearer into the realm of what is absent and can be remembered or into the realm of constructive imagination and treats him to the same deictic words as before so that he may see and hear what can be seen and heard there. . . . Not with the external eye, ear, and so on, but with what is usually called the “mind’s” eye.

“One who is being guided around the phantasy product in imagination,” he continues,

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cannot follow with his eyes the arrow formed by the speaker’s outstretched arm so as to fi nd something there; he cannot use the spatial source quality of the voice to fi nd the place of a speaker who says here. . . . And still, these and other deictic words are offered to him in great variety in a visual account of absent objects.63

The two above types reflect the workings of nostalgic bifocalism, the defi ning characteristic of the visual economy along the Czechoslovak– West German border. Bühler’s fi rst category, “ocular demonstratration,” is instrumental for representations of physical vision—the “look into the Heimat.” In contrast, “imagination-oriented deixis” communicates the volatile, remembered “image of the Heimat.” To foreground the linkage between physical vision and mental image further, let us now recap nostalgia’s overlooked visual roots.

Nostalgia’s Visual Roots Born out of the havoc of the Thirty Years War, nostalgia bundled apprehensions about the uncommon degree of enforced and voluntary mobility. To explain these anxieties’ psychological and somatic effects, in 1688 Johannes Hofer, a medical student in Basel, coined the composite by linking “home” (Heim) with “pain” (Weh) in his dissertation Heimwehe oder Heimsehnsucht. Just as with the object of nostalgic desire, the origin of the term was, in Hofer’s opinion, unambiguously homegrown, which is to say, Swiss. None other than “the gifted Helvetians,” he announced, “have introduced [nostalgia] . . . into their vernacular language, chosen from the grief for the lost charm of the Native Land, which they called das Heimweh.”64 The attachment to one’s native place, the fledgling medic speculated, was incapacitating for those whom life had dispatched elsewhere, be it to a different corner of the Continent or to the village next door. Return was usually the most reliable cure. As the decades went by, however, the importance of physical place, the sine qua non of the affl iction’s etiology for Hofer, dwindled slowly but surely. While “nostalgia” as a term withstood the test of time, its recalibrated meaning broke with Hofer’s diagnoses in several significant ways. Over the last two centuries, scholars have uncoupled longing from it spatial coordinates, to locate it in time. They have transformed “nostalgia” from an individual pathology into a social symptom.65 What

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once was a “curable disease” became “an incurable condition.”66 From a Heimat-bound malaise, nostalgia evolved into a state of mind detached from geographic referents and freed from its parochial origins. Stripped of both nostos and algia, longing has taken on the meaning of a “universal experience” and become a “feature of global culture.”67 At the same time, the term’s perseverance, as this section highlights, has been the most eloquent testimony to the lingering presence of its two components. In the Cold War, only nostalgia’s integral elements, home and pain, helped locate the Bohemian Forest’s past in the geography of the area’s divided present. While the role of “home” in this process must be clear from the previous chapters, “pain” had to do with nostalgia’s “visceral physicality,”68 a quality that has commanded an important sensory arsenal since Hofer’s days. Visual tropes pervade the medic’s account, where they steer the somatic fusion between Heim and Weh. Following in the footsteps of brisk advances in optics and physiology, the text brims with references to the production of images. Describing this deeply flawed process allows the author to chart longing as a disturbance of the visual order. Nostalgics, in Hofer’s description, forever zoom in on the picture of the “Native Land.” But the resulting “images of Heimat,” to use the expellee term, are, in his opinion, not in the least poetic. They are as concretely physical as vision itself. To demonstrate this, Hofer shows how Heimat is “continually represented” in the mind burdened with a compulsive visual surplus (387). For him, nostalgia starts with an “affl icted imagination” in dire need of being “corrected” (381, 388). Hofer observes that excessive fi xation on one idea—and “nothing else creates a stronger impression than the desire recalling the homeland”—generates visual chaos in a weary and unsettled mind, where “various images move about” (381). The condition therefore primarily affects the portion of the brain “in which . . . images of [physical] objects are represented through a certain motion of animal spirits [i.e., nerve impulses].” Especially agitated are “those fibers of the middle brain in which compressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling” (384). “These traces,” continued Hofer, “are actually impressed more vigorously by frequent contemplations of the Fatherland, and from an image of it, so that the animal spirits follow continuously from thence by the same impulse and thus raise up constantly the conscious mind toward considering the image of the Fatherland” (384). Hofer’s tautological invocations of the word “image” perform the excess that he aspires to describe. The verbs—“compress,”

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“cling,” and “impress”—portray the brain as an unstoppable, out-ofkilter printing press. Yet the physical generation and proliferation of the “pathological mental images,” as Elisabeth Bronfen described them in her introduction to Karl Jaspers’s forensic study of Nostalgia and Crime (1909), was not the only thing to relate them to actual vision.69 Albeit indelibly etched onto and into the hosts’ bodies and minds, vignettes of places were unconfi ned to human interiors. Sehnsucht, Hofer’s synonym for Heimweh, soon found an additional outlet in Sehsucht, or addiction to seeing, which interlaced processes mental and physical.70 Translation of the former into the latter further yoked the nostalgic image to actual vision. Their nexus was the cornerstone of Sudeten German bifocalism.

Nostalgia Builds Towers Indeed, according to the Sudeten German sources, in the borderlands the visual urges took fi rm hold of the expellee minds. If we are to believe a visitor writing in 1964, nostalgia “drove” and “pulled” expellees to the Iron Curtain.71 The nostalgic imperative, in such accounts, commanded a vocabulary of compulsion rather than voluntarism, casting Sudeten Germans as submissive subjects with suspended agency. This impression gained even greater momentum whenever the expellees portrayed themselves as “craving” and insatiably ravenous.72 In their own words, they “avidly drank” with their eyes and tucked into views from the border to “quell their visual hunger.” 73 Nostalgia proved irresistible. A few discerning voices chose more moderate undertones to communicate such urgency. In Schroubek’s interpretation, for example, nostalgia did not awaken primal instincts. Rather, it focalized loyalties to the established religious rituals and provided their participants with considerable control over their actions. “The blue hills of the Bohemian Forest,” he maintained, evolved fi rst and foremost into “pilgrimage sites of Heimat nostalgia (Wahlfahrtsstätten der Heimatsehnsucht).” Thus, as one such pilgrim confi rmed, Heimat functioned as a devotional image (Gnadenbild) in its own right.74 Nostalgia, echoed the poet Herbert Wessely, transformed Heimat from a mental image into a sacred object encased “in a glass shrine.” 75 Yet these moderates found themselves in the minority. Most expellees endowed nostalgia with an uncommon degree of force controlling more

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than just human interiors. From their vantage point, nostalgia also took the reins over the architectural interventions in the Cold War landscape. While longing did not explain the prayer wall’s consolidation, it made the process seem unquestionable and unavoidable. Writing in 1962, Heinz Schauwecker, a Bavarian doctor with poetic ambitions and a long history of nationalist commitment, epitomized this perception. He fell back on the iambic simplicity of his verse to praise “nostalgia that builds towers” (Sehnsucht, die Türme baut).76 Nothing but nostalgia, confi rmed an anonymous expellee newspaper contributor, “implemented the idea” of civilian construction in the Cold War borderlands.77 The occasion for Schauwecker’s poem, despite the ambitious plural form harnessed by the author, was singular. He imagined issuing his call from a very specific elevation, “the Heimat tower at Neualbenreuth,” to which he would pay yearly visits after its opening on 3–4 June 1961.78 The newest station along the prayer wall was a place, he proposed, where West Germans could enjoy views of the Bohemian Forest “hand in hand” with their expelled peers from the Egerland.79 Already three years earlier, Schauwecker had condemned the divide in poems with such uncomplicated titles as “The Border” and “At the Border!” He likened the death strip to a “deep tear in the chest,” and described the rift itself as a “mockery of all creation.”80 While some limits, he proposed, are god-given to help humans “regulate property and order,” the Continent’s Cold War partition was nothing of the sort. The tower of Neualbenreuth, the fi rst new civilian lookout tower along the prayer wall and the chain’s only structure that so closely anticipated the construction of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961, gave him a proper platform from which to broadcast his most vocal objections: The border, however, which with its barbed wire fractures the land, wounds the home soil and disgraces the name of man because it splits hearts, disturbs the peace— that false border is the devil’s. [Die Grenze aber, die mit Stacheldraht das Land aufreißt, die heimatliche Erde verwundet und den Menschennamen schändet, weil sie die Herzen trennt, den Frieden stört, die machtverlogne Grenze ist des Teufels.]81

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Since the early 1950s, Neualbenreuth and Mähring, a neighboring site about seven miles away, conjoined devotion and nostalgic vision on a scale without precedent elsewhere along the Czechoslovak–West German border. There, the “look into the Heimat,” in Schroubek’s formulation, became “well-nigh integrated into the liturgical process.”82 Although both locales had been popular since the late 1940s, only in the 1960s did they become versatile architectural entities, complete with small pilgrimage chapels and lookout towers intended to satisfy their visitors’ yearnings. Moreover, as Schauwecker’s poem from 1962 attests, both places quickly evolved into outposts for mapping the borderland’s visual economy. Contemporaneously, they became sources of inspiration for those who, like the Bavarian poet, channeled their impressions via specific literary and pictorial forms. Indeed, not only did rosters of the sites’ sponsors, regularly released under the designated rubrics in the homeland leaflets, meticulously document the progress of construction, but the towers’ slow but steady growth was a staple of poems with titles that closely matched Schauwecker’s. In the following, let us consider the early days of these two locations and then, in the next rubric, look at them through the prism of the lyrical works that accompanied their emergence. Their inception enjoyed enthusiastic support for several reasons. Above all, it generated few complications. In contrast to the pilgrimage sites described in chapter 2, neither Neualbenreuth nor Mähring required a foundational miracle. Both were born out of rare consensus between the locals and the expellees and did not have to be extricated from the web of contradictory rumors. The view that they proffered counted as extraordinary enough, as did their adjacence to Europe’s alleged center at Tillen. Besides, visitors marveled at the felicitous distance of these places from the bombed-out urban remains. In the immediate postwar years, admitted one Neualbenreuth visitor in 1950, giving in to nostalgia opened the door to escaping the rubble of such cities as Nuremberg, where many expellees had found new homes.83 The expanse separating Sudeten Germans from their Heimat was, in contrast, considerably foreshortened. “Oh you monument to the earlier golden days,” exclaimed the amateur poet Betty Künl in one of her Mähring-themed works, “from the enviably fortuitous proximity you face/Heimat from which we are so very, very far away.”84 Additionally, these new destinations owed their success to the prominent place of lookout towers in tourist geographies of the former Sudetenland prior to 1945. “Which mountains in the Ba-

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varian Forest,” asked Fritz Huemer-Kreiner in his Heimat questionnaire from 1955, “had lookout towers?”85 His fellow countrymen did not hesitate about the answers. Cold War–era expellee periodicals frequently dwelled on the heyday and decline of several such landmarks, including the Bismarck Tower at Grünberg/Zelená Hora (1890–1909), the tower at Kapellenberg near Mährisch Schönberg/Šumperk (1931), and the Altvater Tower atop Altvater/Pradeˇd (1897–1934).86 At Neualbenreuth and Mähring, the expellees could fi nally shift their attention from decay to construction. They intended the new projects to serve the future even if in their fi nished state they would be an open invitation to indulge the images of Heimat’s past. In fact, both locales fostered a coexistence between these two vectors. On the one hand, photographs of the towers’ building sites, fi lled with energetic if aging volunteers amid the debris, closely resembled the imagery of forwardlooking postwar reconstruction. On the other hand, the outcomes of these “joint efforts” of expellees and locals, one newspaper proclaimed, “permit[ted] a glance at the place toward which the longings will always reach out”—into the past. 87 Expellee chroniclers eventually settled on portraying nostalgia as a compulsive yet gentle force, a soft power much needed to achieve a modicum of balance if not rapprochement. Binoculars, rather than guns, were its “valuable weapon” of choice.88 Despite its beginnings in the expellee-specific project of recuperating Heimat, the prayer wall was quickly assimilated into the broader Western Cold War agenda. In the age when the “watchtowers of the Kreml’s band of soldiers” mushroomed ominously in the East, as one speaker at the dedication ceremony in Neualbenreuth put it, the new borderland structures in the West were hailed as a welcome counterpoint. “Sufficiently clear and difficult-to-overlook,” they were nevertheless advertised as unquestionably peaceful.89 Sudeten Germans specified that, in contrast to the military fortifications that sprouted to the east, their own edifices were “strictly” for looking, not surveillance.90 They drew a clear line between their Contax, Leica, or Voigtländer viewfi nders and their enemies’ gunsights. “While the watchdogs on the other side were armed to their teeth,” reported one expellee visitor from Neualbenreuth, “in the West visitors peacefully snapped away with their cameras.” “Two worldviews could not be more opposite,” the writer continued, adopting the language of the period’s binaries. To the west lay the land of “concord and peace” (Ruhe), whereas the East offered nothing but “serfl ike travails under the military’s watchful eye.”91 To perpetuate the idiom

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of peace, in 1964 another visitor observed that years of fundraising and construction had given Sudeten Germans a chance to “look over [the border] lovingly, with quiet longing.” 92 The Neualbenreuth site, another expellee commentator remarked on the occasion of its fifteenth anniversary, laid bare the “liberal views of the West and the unfreedom of the East” with particularly acuity. The poet Johann Andreas Blaha, for his part, went as far as to implore the Virgin of Mercy, painted on the adjacent chapel’s interior, to help the expellees “pray the wall down.”93 As reported in chapter 3, discussions of the new lookout towers attempted to establish peace as an integral feature of the Cold War borderland’s Western imaginary. These efforts did not always dovetail with the much more aggressive tone of the expellee pronouncements regarding their eventual return home. To boost the new towers’ credibility, Sudeten German authors therefore attempted to keep revisionist claims at bay and make sure that, more than anything, the new structures registered as an agreeable antithesis to the East’s military displays along the Iron Curtain. Nostalgia, from their standpoint, helped hammer swords into plowshares and transform the armed watchtowers in the East into the disarming lookout towers in the West. “Destiny,” explained Roland Questel, the SdL’s regional chairperson, “wanted that the borderland tower be constructed in the same year as the Berlin Wall. If the Wall was built out of fear and hatred, the borderland tower emerged out of love and longing.”94 The vistas that the new edifices helped recuperate counted as a valid if incomplete substitute for the physical locales left behind the Cold War barrier. “It is above all the longing for the Heimat that draws us to this area,” affi rmed an anonymous columnist who, in the rubric “Here Stands My Heimat’s House,” helped the readers of one expellee weekly keep abreast of the progress at the Neualbenreuth site. “The hope to be able to look across the border has irresistible appeal,” continued the author. “As we took leave back then,” he added, “we had no time to say good-bye to old familiar places. Here we can celebrate a farewell and a reunion at the same time, even if only from a distance.” This, in the author’s opinion, was a clear advantage, since in contrast to all other expellee groups, Sudeten Germans could steadily count on getting a glimpse of their Heimat in the future.95 As one female visitor in the late 1970s gratefully acknowledged, not everyone could “partake of [Heimat] from the borderland tower surrounded by rustling birch trees.”96 The “look into the Heimat,” as is obvious from the varied vocabulary culled to de-

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scribe this visual experience—especially the verbs werfen (throw) and tun (do)—possessed an unfailingly active thrust.

Through the Iron Curtain Expellees who convened at Mähring for spontaneous get-togethers or large yearly reunions were among the fi rst to commit this dynamism to paper. Their sources, to which we will now turn, deliver the most consistent account of what the “look into the Heimat” meant to its earliest practitioners, and they attest to how it motivated civilian construction in the borderlands. As usual, the story began on a hill. What “may have once been an . . . insignificant elevation where hardly anyone would set foot,” the ever dedicated border visitor Franz Reipirch recounted, now “became a pilgrimage destination, a ‘window’ from which one can look into the Heimat.” This metaphorical window, the author continued, attracted above all those who recognized the area and flocked to the border to “walk the old paths in spirit.” In front of them was “the nearby border forest,” while “behind it, hills and valleys, forests and fields . . . emerg[ed] dreamily.” Reipirch did not take such transparency for granted. “May a clear view,” he exclaimed, “reward the poor traveler” following the long walk from a remote railway station in Tirschenreuth, more than fi fteen kilometers away. “May he feel,” the author declared with liturgical solemnity, like a thirsty one who after long travels comes upon a well—this is how he will feel when he steps out of the forests . . . and sees Mähring, behind it the border forest and over it the “forbidden country.” . . . In spirit he again walks the familiar paths and sees things he had not [previously] noticed because he had never thought that once upon a time he will have to greet the faraway Heimat in longing and love from the Bavarian border.

A self-appointed priest at the new “pilgrimage site . . . where [the expellees] will recharge for the continued life” in Germany, Reipirch also positioned himself as a mastermind of this site’s future. “When I stand at the border and look across,” he enticingly proposed, “in the wind, in the smell of the fields, I believe to sense something that we miss here and now. It is Heimat that is tangible here, and the same wind blows a couple hundred meters away to the east over the forests and valleys where

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we were once at home.” “What would it be like,” he wondered, “were a memorial chapel to rise on this site, so that its little steeple could look over the forests, over the border forest into the old Heimat?” An actual “chapel of peace . . . at the border to a godless country” would eventually lend Reipirch’s metaphorical window concrete physical shape.97 The window, both imagined and real, was a feature that defi ned the design of civilian Cold War structures in the Czech–Bavarian borderlands and organized nostalgic bifocalism on site. In the expellee milieu, it was a motif that took on quickly, making an appearance already in the earliest sketches meant to transport the dynamism of “the look into the Heimat” to the faraway reader. In 1953, the mouthpiece of Mähring’s fans—a weekly for the expellees from around Bohemian Plan, Weseritz/Bezdružice, Tepl/Teplá, and Petschau/Becˇov nad Teplou—mapped just such a “look across the border to the Heimat” (fig. 26). Based on a sketch by Adolf Huska, a well-known Sudeten German composer, musician, and former choir conductor from Plan, and later reprinted in several editions of the guidebook to the new chapel for which Reipirch had lobbied, the drawing asymmetrically subdivides the pictorial plane into East and West.98 The latter boasts few things that would have captured the artist’s attention. Aside from a little chapel at Mähring, flanked by

figure 26. After Adolf Huska, Look across the Border to Heimat. From HbPW 5, no. 58 (June 1953): 417. Courtesy of Verlag Heimatbrief für die Kreise Plan-Weseritz und TeplPetschau.

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two trees, and a landscape of the neighboring elevation, identified as Überbühl (or, literally, “over the hill”), the West has little to offer the nostalgic eye. The East, by contrast, is a much larger expanse fi lled with landmarks and place names. To borrow from Reipirch, it is a “tangible,” recognizable terrain. The circular shape underneath the chapel, punctuated by a black center against the white background, at fi rst glance suggests a target—the point where the viewer’s attention presumably falls. And yet the opposite is the case. Instead of the destination, the circle marks the point of departure. Suggestive of an eye with a dark pupil that mandates vision across the border in three straight lines, the roundel demarcates a vantage point and invites the reader to assume a position on the map. Symbolically, this nostalgic eye rests at the foundation of the building and, by implication, of the emerging prayer wall itself. But it is not the eye as it is known in contemporary theories of human vision—it is not an intromissive organ receiving signals, rays, or reflections. Instead of being a receptacle, it is a point of origination, an emissive source capable of violating the border.99 Its rays both penetrate the divide and thin it out by reducing it to a dotted line. Nostalgic vision not only “lifts a corner” of the Iron Curtain, to reiterate one visitor’s impression, in Huska’s sketch it creates an opening for looking through the barrier. And there is hardly another term that sums up what the art historian Erwin Panofsky called “the modern sense of space” more concisely than “looking through”—Albrecht’s Dürer’s synonym for linear perspective.100 The latter has come to stand for a framed, delimited view as well as the viewer’s immobile, fi xed position, emblematic of how space has been predominantly captured and understood since 1435, when Leon Battista Alberti invited his contemporaries to outline the limits of the seen by imagining a window in front of them. Since the Renaissance, “the single image in a single frame” has been a motif in nearly every visual register or medium, from painting to cinema screens to computer monitors.101 Beginning with Huska’s sketch, expellees adopted these tenets for the material culture of borderland visuality. As if to counter the observation that “walls and gates [are] things we build around ourselves to obstruct the view,” Huska’s drawing confidently opened the Iron Curtain for the eye.102 His gesture, as my subsequent discussion of Neualbenreuth will elaborate, would soon become a self-fulfi lling prophecy. Huska’s emissive eye, however, is far from all-powerful. The window,

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as the rendition of his sketch shows, presents a scene rather than an allencompassing panorama. It is a partial view and not a readily accessible whole. Indeed, on site, comprehensive (umfassend) vistas were such a rarity that in 1966 a regular visitor could remember only one such occasion, from a decade earlier.103 The reasons for the constraint ranged from forestation to weather. These were the rare instances when Sudeten Germans, instead of accusing Czechoslovak authorities of running the Bohemian Forest into the ground, complained about “Heimat’s plentiful forests” blocking the view. Others prayed, half jokingly, that the “weather god” would fi nally show the Heimat “unveiled,” rather than shrouded in rain or fog.104 “Will it be possible to get a good view of Eger in this weather?” speculated a skeptical traveler who was in for a disappointment.105 Instead of panning over the entire expanse of Heimat, on Huska’s reworked sketch the eye’s rays traverse the picture plane on a diagonal to span only a narrow section to the south of Plan—the location of the original St. Anna church that Reipirch and his followers set out to replicate in Mähring. A reference to the resulting “far-sighted vista” in the accompanying editorial caption further suggests depth rather than breadth. Only by exposing the layers step by step, according to the brief editorial summary, could a “complete image” be produced: From Pfaffenbühl [the hill next to Mähring], a delightfully far-sighted vista opens up to the viewer. Across the forested backdrop one sees Plan and its environs. In the changing sunlight the town’s landmarks gradually appear, on and off: a railway station, church, secondary school building, and hospital. . . . Some houses in Obergodrisch and the Untergodrisch in its entirety are visible. Heiligenkreuz is covered by treetops.106

And real-life Mähring visitors described their “look into the Heimat” as a similarly gradual process, occasionally obstructed by the forests’ “unfortunate” growth. The “fi rst viewing target,” reported one of them on the eve of the chapel’s construction, “was the factory,” which was “completely visible.” But, of course, he continued, the senses soon ran up against the treetops, so that it was impossible to fi nd out whether it is in operation. Past it one can see the wooden surveying tower that the Czechs probably left standing for strategic reasons. Further to the left is Willfahrt’s house; however I could not make out where the actual village begins—everything was behind trees.107

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In a report with the plain title “What Our Eyes Saw,” another visitor enumerated the landmarks seen from Mähring’s “holy” hill—the location chosen for the new St. Anna chapel. Reportedly, during the fi rst “pilgrimage to the border,” when the diminutive structure (its foundation measured only 3.5 by 5.5 meters) was being dedicated on 25–26 July 1953, from morning till night, groups, even entire columns trekked to our new chapel of St. Anna just as they once had to the [original] Mount of St. Anna [near Plan]. . . . The look into the Heimat, aided by the clear skies, was good. Countless binoculars were passed from one hand to another. In front of us the environs of Plan. Everyone is in search of his proximate (engere) Heimat.108

In the mind of Willi Junker, the future head of the Plan/Weseritz expellee association, his fellow countrymen’s midnight excursions amounted to a vote for the site’s success. And, indeed, more than four thousand voted with their feet after the regional expellee newsletter disseminated pilgrimage registration forms and promised a shuttle bus between Mähring and the nearest railway station in Tirschenreuth, some ten miles away.109 For about a month the same source also publicized the program for the upcoming “border pilgrimage” (which doubled as a local and regional Sudeten German reunion, or Heimattreffen) in a format soon adopted by expellees elsewhere along the border. A typical agenda featured business meetings, small-scale rallies, folk music concerts, a liturgy in the village’s parish church, and a procession to the new St. Anna chapel (fig. 27), culminating with hours of conviviality at the local brewery.110 The alluring proximity of the border, however, turned out to be conviviality’s serious rival. If the accounts I presented in chapter 3 are any indication, many attendees spent more time looking across the divide than relaxing over a drink. “The pilgrimage to the hilltop lasted the entire Sunday, and some may have been up there three or four times,” reported the newsletter in 1953.111 “When I observe that the stream of those who walk up to Pfaffenbühl’s top,” Junker breathlessly recited, only to look into the Heimat did not cease and that people reached for all sorts of binoculars to search for any familiar place, that our countrymen lingered on the hill even at the midnight hour on the lookout for the lights of

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figure 27. Present-day church exterior with the adjacent lookout tower, St. Anna, Mähring. Photo by the author.

Plan—all this certainly proved . . . how happy they were to catch the smallest glimpse [of Heimat].112

By 1967, visitors came armed with telescopes even better equipped to magnify their “ancestral Heimat across the Iron Curtain.”113 Thus, the chapel’s incorporation, between 1965 and 1967, into a considerably

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more costly church, and the subsequent addition of a lookout tower in 1973, were milestones in a relatively smooth progression that amplified the conditions for nostalgic vision. In the words of Betty Künl, the sound of the chapel’s bells underscored nostalgia itself. “Since your little bell called us for the fi rst time,” she wrote in yet another poetic tribute to Mähring, “once again with all its might/the longing for our Heimat/that has been dormant in the heart awakens yet again.”114

Boundless Nostalgia What was the place of the border fortifications in the views spurred by such powerful longings? This question has to do with the relationship between looking and seeing in the Cold War borderlands. The equivalence between these two was as uncertain for the new sites’ visitors as it was for Emma Stifter. Looking, of course, remained the integral fi rst step to seeing. Yet what one saw—and especially if one saw it with the mind’s nostalgic eye—often lay beyond the purview of actual vision. Thus, opinions about the prominence of the Iron Curtain were split. Some Sudeten German guests at Neualbenreuth and Mähring were reluctant to register the changes. Their impressions, whether in prose or poetry, frequently resisted the kind of border awareness that I described in chapter 3. Those who followed in Huska’s steps preferred to portray the Iron Curtain as permeable, or even partially absent. In some cases, the expellees believed that natural forces took charge of the barrier’s partial dismantling. The border surrendered, some imagined, to the wind’s most languid blows, and not even “antitank obstactle or watchtowers manned by soldiers could stop the tender, homelike greetings of the wind.”115 The arrival of verdant spring, especially, was a force that bowed to no borders (see my discussion of Reipirch’s report in chapter 3). “Now in May it is quite green/The barbed wire is hardly visible,/Over the meadow on both sides/dandelions scattered their gold coins/and the sun/spends its undivided blessings,” announced a stanza in yet another amateur “At the Border” poem from 1967.116 Other instances of downplaying the barrier assigned agency to humans and their construction projects. The towers’ architecture was a factor particularly prominent in cementing nostalgic bifocalism, predicated on the unfettered view through the Iron Curtain. Atop these new, man-made structures, the divide could be visually manipulated. From

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Neualbenreuth’s tower, proclaimed one visitor in 1979, “the border drawn by people does not count for our eyes and our spirit.”117 According to Götz-Kollmer’s poetic take on standing “At the Border” (1986), “a turnpike stares—/and blocks your way,” but “your soul, it fl ies/with the wind/that combs through the tree tops with murmur/toward and over the border.”118 Another traveler tried on Emma Stifter’s nostalgic bifocalism as late as 1988: “Border fence, watchtowers, and deserted landscape do not prevent one from imagining the villages that once stood here.”119 This way of looking rendered the border’s presence insubstantial. Those who did acknowledge the substance gave the contrast between the environment and the barrier’s new appearance their undivided attention. In their minds, the divide was subject to incessant change, whereas nature, by contrast, bore the burden of immutability. In the fi rst two strophes of Anton Schreiegg’s poem “Heimat at the Border” (1965), nature—mountains, forests, moon, and water springs— fi rst breathes “God’s peace.” Only in the following stanza does he contrast the lull with “a torn-up border/that wants to keep [the “I”] from panning across the distance.” The purpose of panning, however, is unclear, since all one can see across the border are mile-long wastelands, farms overgrown with thistle, and steppe-like expanses.120 A similar opposition determines the course of Julius Ertel’s “At the Border” (1966), which opens with the characteristic juxtaposition of standing and looking: “At the border I stood for some time/Looked into the Heimat.” On the one hand, some things have remained unchanged, the lyrical “I” observes. The forests “again had their long familiar sound,” and “the mountains squarely stood/in the green exuberance.” On the other hand, the houses and fields across the border lie abandoned, the meadows do not bloom, and “barbed wire disdainfully/dr[a]ws gray lines” across the muted green. As if this already depressing outlook was not enough, up on a Czechoslovak watchtower a border guard “kept both hands on the machine gun.” He “did not put vigilance to rest,/even though everything was deserted all around.”121 Maragareta Pschorn, a poet since age sixteen, spoke of the sprigs and greens that blossom on Bohemia’s border and “know nothing of death.”122 Although people, it followed, knew too much of it, Pschorn was reticent to divulge the details. Skalitzky, for his part, echoed Pschorn’s remark in a poem with the deliberately ambiguous title “Über die Grenze,” translatable alternately as “Across the Border” or “About the Border.” He distracted his readers from the bleak “armored tower and barbed wire

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fences/[that] guard the naked death strip” by drawing their attention to the continuity of nature’s seasons: “Look! Over there our old barn is still dreaming,/near which pears must be ripening again.”123 Trautl Irgang, an amateur lyricist, chimed in as late as 1984 to say that some things never change. Despite the unmistakable transformations of the border, her Tillen ostensibly remained intact: I stand At the border And look into the countryside— And across I see On the clearing The fence, the watchtower, A new forest path, A dilapidated house, A dead railroad track, Tillen lies Close enough to touch, Majestic— As it has always been.124

One of the period’s last border-themed poems, Alois Wanka’s “Evening at the Border to CSSR” (1989), also picked up on the opposition between nature and border. Instead of opening with the conventional pairing of the intensely personal “I stood”/“I saw,” Wanka attempted to simulate an overall sensory experience of the setting, especially the hushed twilight sounds and muted colors. By blurring any trace of the lyrical “I,” Wanka provided a poetic sketch of everyman’s borderland experience, even though his topography and local knowledge remained uniquely Sudeten German. As the poem zooms in on details—Wanka moves from moon and stars to leaves and streams—its mounting intensity steers the reader beyond language to engage the senses, especially hearing and sight. We ostensibly hear that the evening quietly descends as “the bells toll from far away,” and we see how the moon attracts the stars while a wisp of fog rises from the valley.125 The poem continues to alternate between the aural and the visual. As did Lorenz before him, Wanka defi nes most such experiences in negative terms and, eventually, turns the senses off one by one: “no more lights can be seen/No more sound disturbs the peace,/Only the rustling

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(Rascheln) of sleeping leaves/And the babbling (Rauschen) of the water.” The soothing lullaby effect of his lines, however, does not last past the second strophe. There is, Wanka discovers, something in this dormant landscape that does not sleep. Despite the deceptive structural resemblance to the poem’s introductory line (“From far away the bells resound”), the beginning of the third stanza announces the troubling discovery. It changes the subject from nature to the border: “From the border at Tillen in the East/The flashing (Blinken) of the eastern power./A guard stands still on his post,/a patrol that guards the border.” The fl ickering lights in the East do not go off at dusk and thus undercut the earlier impression that “no more light can be seen.” Simultaneously, they point to the parallelism between flashing (blinken) in the East and looking (blicken) in the West. The border, in Wanka’s description, is not only a site “where political powers meet dreams,” as he suggests in the concluding fourth strophe, but also a scene of where the parameters of the encounter between the blocs are negotiated. The expellee nostalgic bifocalism is part of this equation.

Coda: Windows for Longing Opened in June 1961, Neualbenreuth’s so-called Tower of Heimat (Turm der Heimat), or simply borderland tower (Grenzlandturm), preceded comparable buildings along the inter-German border by about two years. It was thus one of the fi rst new civilian structures to embody, in architectural terms, the Western part of the above encounter.126 In contrast to Mähring’s chronicle, however, the annals of Neualbenreuth script a history that lacks a steady crescendo. Whereas in Mähring St. Mary’s devotees had fi rst hallowed the grounds by consecrating the chapel, and only then went on to indulge their visual cravings on the top of a tower, planners of the Neualbenreuth site omitted this kind of prelude. In fact, the order of construction at Neualbenreuth’s larger and more elaborate complex—“the paradise at the borderland tower,” as the editors of the Egerer Zeitung called it—reversed the sequence of the steps taken at Mähring and reduced the entire project’s timeframe to only three years.127 Thus, the fi rst chapter of the site’s architectural life was secular, although religion, as the above allusion to paradise indicates, was never far away. The tower’s dedication left no doubt that looking was a priority—a proper goal of each visit.128 Piety came in only as a close second. The

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nearby (rather than adjacent) chapel of St. Mary of Peace would be built and decorated two years later after lengthy negotiations with Franz Gruß, a professional artist known for his World War I–themed wall painting inside Eger’s nunnery church of St. Clare. By late 1963, Neualbenreuth prided itself on the fi rst new lookout tower along the Czechoslovak–West German border, the most immediate access to the “center of Europe” at Tillen, located within walking distance, as well as the fi rst (and last) set of frescos that an academically trained painter of some renown would paint so closely to the Iron Curtain. “Not every chapel can boast . . . a genuine Gruß,” rhapsodized Friedrich Arnold, a member of the Bavarian parliament, in a letter to the village priest. With the completed site, Arnold went on, Neualbenreuth gave Bavaria a landmark (Sehenswürdigkeit), a “unique thing.”129 And in this case, the landmark was designed not just for being seen, but, fi rst and foremost, for seeing. Even before the new towers materialized in the midst of the Continent’s Cold War reality, they had been long-cherished fantasies. Their anticipated heights captured the poetic imagination across gender and age, so that Schauwecker, whom we met earlier, was by far not their only minstrel.130 Leni Wunderlich, the daughter of an Eger-born gardening entrepreneur and a contributor to a number of expellee newspapers, stepped forward as one of the earliest and most passionate advocates of the towers’ construction. In 1959, almost exactly two years before the dedication of Neualbenreuth’s tower in early summer 1961, she entertained the structure’s possible impact in five lengthy strophes. From the editors’ perspective, neither her poem nor the others discussed in this chapter appeared to merit any special rubric. Much like photographs, the poems were embedded in the midst of other features or columns (an article on South Tyrol’s autonomy, in Wunderlich’s case) as an odd non sequitur that invited a spontaneous leap from one topic to the next. In contrast to their canonical antecedents—occasional poems composed to celebrate the public unveiling of a monument or landmark, such as Theodore Fontane’s “On the Cologne Cathedral Festivities” (Zum Kölner Domfest, 1880)—Wunderlich’s earliest stanzas breathed with anticipation of an event that had yet to take place. They strayed away from the canon in other ways, too. Above all, the poet’s simple rhymes, the most glaringly obvious of which paired “land” with “Egerland,” suggested that the power of her lyrical craft was not the verses’ primary draw. To offset their aesthetic shortcomings, Wunderlich’s lines conjured up a sense of intimacy that the expellees would come to associ-

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ate with the civilian borderland towers sprouting to the west of the Iron Curtain—a sense that the vertical hierarchy of such structures seemingly belied. In this regard, the poem’s ostensibly cerebral title, “Thoughts on the Construction of the Lookout Tower,” turned out to be deceptive. Wunderlich’s poetic voice did not so much express thoughts as pit memories against forecasts. Her reminiscences proved so poignant that the fi rst strophe opened with a retrospective question, the immediate and informal tone of which shared little with the detached, pensive chord struck in the title.131 “Do you remember,” the lyrical “I” asks the implied reader, “the mountain encircled by sagas/that stands at the border as a guard?” Precisely this location, in Wunderlich’s poetic terms, possessed the potential to recapture the view that had eluded her compatriots ever since their arrival in West Germany. “The look,” she proceeds to announce, “once went across the flourishing land—/into Bohemia, into Bavaria, into the Egerland./How often this look delighted the eye/and cheered the hearts in blessed contemplation!” The poem’s goal was to overcome vision’s melancholic association with the past and assert looking as a preoccupation of the present and future. The tower, Wunderlich’s lines preemptively suggest, promised to replace figments of the imagination with images, to assert vision over imagination. It would perhaps even draw a line between the “image of the Heimat” and the “look into the Heimat,” and thus dismantle the structure of nostalgic bifocalism. Although these speculations turned out to be mistaken, they allowed the author to focus on more than just the bygones. In the course of the poem, Wunderlich’s Tillen, euphemistically identified as the “storied mountain,” would become the location that converted expellee losses into gains. Just like Osser in Lorenz’s stanzas, Tillen connects the poem’s beginning with its end, where it makes its fi nal appearance. The poem’s advance toward the future is nevertheless hesitant, and the forward-looking disposition proved more difficult to come by than initially imagined. This difficulty manifests itself in a retardant moment that recalls the structure in Lorenz’s verse. Well into the second stanza, the lyrical “I” still lingers on that which is no more. She highlights in particular the magnitude of what the expellees’ eyes had had to forgo when “the greedy hatred [of the Czechs] took [their] Heimat away.” On the eve of the departure from the postwar Sudetenland, the “I” contends, her implied Sudeten German interlocutors reached for something other than earthly possessions. They were much more likely to rush “one last time/ to take a look at Heimat” than to pack their valuables. And, indeed, lit-

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tle could have been more important than this idealized symbolic rite, since, she claims, the latter soon proved difficult, if not impossible, to reenact on West German soil. In contrast to Emma Stifter, Wunderlich’s lyrical “I” finds herself incapable of seeing even the smallest corner of the Heimat from her new home in the West. This, she hastens to add, is not for lack of effort: “I have since often stood on hilltops and ridges;/nostalgia drove me to see Heimat.” Yet no matter how much she strained her eyes, Wunderlich complains in the third stanza, she could neither retrieve her Heimat’s mental image nor detect its physical contours in space: “Where can I fi nd it, the beautiful land . . . ? / I couldn’t fi nd it, it was too far away.” To resolve such nagging questions, “on the hill at the border, encircled by sagas,/a lookout tower should soon go up for us all.” From this “period hallmark,” the speaker concluded, every expellee, young and old, will have to “look into the Heimat at least once.” And indeed, the tower’s main purpose was to emplace vision in the Cold War borderlands and anchor it to the image, whether real or projected, accessible from the platform (fig. 28). With the fi nal costs estimated at 23,000 German marks, the new “Mecca for the Egerlanders and their friends,” initially envisioned as a synergetic whole made up of the tower, with a fi rst-floor dining room, chapel, and an unexecuted alpine hut, rose after years of fundraising among donors large and small.132 Many individual donors limited themselves to 5 German marks, while the more significant sums, ranging between 30 and 100 German marks, came from the Egerlanders’ regional associations (Gmoin) and from publishing houses such as Ernst Bartl’s Egerland-Verlag.133 While the land parcel was a gift from Neualbenreuth’s administration, the “Heimat-conscious men,” locals and expellees alike, took on equipment rental and labor.134 Construction, reminisced Neualbenreuth’s historian Meinhard Köstler, “required courageous men, industrious laborers and numerous individual donors.”135 “The project begun with such enthusiasm may and will never lack sacrificial readiness on the part of our fellow countrymen,” declared one zealous supporter in 1959. “The tower will stand!”136 The initiative’s most active supporters—Christof Reinl, former president of the Community of Egerlanders (Eghalanda Gmoi) and Josef Trißl, chief border police officer and “selfless chair” of the Upper Palatine Forest League (Oberpfälzer Waldverein)—cemented the link be-

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figure 28. Present-day exterior of the Heimat Tower, Neualbenreuth. Photo by the author.

tween expellee activism and West German civic environmentalism. Besides, some predicted, the new structure would afford yet another opportunity to revive local tourism. The asphalt road, paved in the mid1960s, would protect travelers “from dust, stones, and potholes,” keeping their spirits high and pressed clothes intact.137 Accordingly, the tower was described in the language of an advertising campaign, with an emphasis on its novelty and its allegedly streamlined design. “New and slim,” one of its earliest chroniclers foretold, the “new tourist magnet in Eastern Bavaria” would be located right at the “western foothills of our

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Bohemian Forest, at storied Tillen.”138 According to Bartl, Sudeten Germans would visit the tower until the day of their return home. But even then, he claimed, every once in a while, they would go back to enjoy the impressive view and a beer.139 Given such assurances, it was hardly surprising that by the early 1980s the tower had become handy tourist bait, exploited in newspaper advertisements for vacations “at Tillenberg, the Center of Europe.”140 By 1964, the signatures of those who had ascended to the top of the structure—visitors from “Holland, France, Austria, England, Spain, USA, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Bolivia, and Africa”—fi lled up as many as three guest books. And some twenty years later, these same Sudeten Germans “from faraway places” returned, still “teary-eyed and fi lled with longing.”141 In 1988, despite heavy rains and poor visibility, the tower registered as many as 15,972 visitors—4,000 more than in the previous year. In 1989, the Borderland Tower Working Group (ARGE Grenzlandturm), composed of members of the Eger and Marienbad expellee associations, the Township of Neualbenreuth, the Upper Palatine Forest League, and the SdL, enthusiastically discussed the possibility of turning the tower’s dining room (Stüberl) into a proper inn (Gaststätte). Köstler, as head of the working group, lobbied for the compound’s expansion and preservation, “material as well as ideational.”142 With an eye to preservation, the tower was designed to be not only in but also of the landscape, even if this was by no means the initial impression. At fi rst glance, the structure’s forbidding dark exterior evoked a medieval dungeon the size and distinctly man-made appearance of which seemed at odds with its surroundings. Its strangeness was not lost on the editors of the monthly Der Egerländer, who reproduced a snapshot that struck them as particularly “odd-looking” (fig. 29). In the foreground, read the caption, “a farmer from Neualbenreuth tills the field with his horse.” In the middle plane, “one car after the other, packed with nostalgic fellow countrymen, streams toward the nearby lookout tower at Tillen.” Finally, the horizon line belongs to the tower itself. Dwarfi ng a cluster of trees in an adjacent clearing, the structure stands in apparent contradiction to the landscape, natural and cultural alike. A building put together in such a “solid and lasting manner” seemed to be a dubious match for the scenery of “flowering meadows, expansive fields rimmed with the heavy blue-green color of the mountains, quiet

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figure 29. “An odd-looking image. A farmer from Neualbenreuth tills the field with his horse, while one car after the other, packed with nostalgic fellow countrymen, streams toward the nearby lookout tower at Tillen.” From Der Egerländer 16, no. 5 (May 1965): 1. Courtesy of Helmut Preußler Verlag.

ponds that laugh into the skies with their bright eyes,” and all the other elements that “arouse the feeling that God our father opened his kind hand especially benevolently and strewed bountiful beauty onto this little patch of land.”143 Yet, the expellee observers on site wanted to see the tower’s seventytwo-foot-tall shaft, with its eighty-three steps and octagonal platform, hover in the air weightlessly. They thus spared few efforts to naturalize the structure, and the original building materials proved a great help. Until a major renovation in 1967, which sheathed the building’s entire exterior in copper to prevent decay, the tower existed as a structure both built from local wood and imagined to spring up from underneath the forest’s green cover.144 The earliest photographs of its construction frequently were taken from a low angle, to insinuate that the scaffolding had emerged out of the natural environment. Fir trees framed this ostensibly organic skeleton, crowned for full effect with a greening branch for the traditional topping-out ceremony (fig. 30). As if to gratify such efforts, in 1962, one visitor observed that the tower “architecturally blend[ed] in with the landscape as if it had always been there.”145 Precisely the environmental roots of the building were the empha-

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figure 30. “The lookout tower with a little topping-out branch.” From EZ 11, no. 20 (October 1960): 283. Courtesy of Egerer Landtag e. V.

sis of Wunderlich’s two other poems, the fi rst written to document the tower’s construction and the second to mark the structure’s dedication. The former anticipated that A tower will soon rise, growing out of the forest’s green, And the look in free fl ight can drift toward the beloved Heimat! Already the ancients built towers, symbols of constant vigilance. Today, the new era calls for faith, religious wars and battles. [Daß der Turm sich bald erhebe—wachsend aus dem Waldes Grün und der Blick in freier Schwebe kann zur lieben Heimat zieh’n!

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Schon die Alten bauten Türme, Zeichen steter Wachsamkeit. Glaubensnot und–kampf und Stürme birgt auch heut die neue Zeit.]

If the tower, from Wunderlich’s perspective, was a natural outcropping, so was the borderland’s Cold War battle for the faith. She extended this analogy to vision, since, in the poet’s expression, the tower would put an end to the unnatural restrictions and barriers that had previously constrained her countrymen’s eyes. From the Cold War crusaders’ outpost that she imagined the tower to be, Wunderlich defiantly concluded that “what is otherwise denied to our eyes will be freely accessible to the look,/—forest and field and green meadows—recalling the old times.”146 As they conjoined vision and image, Wunderlich’s lines spelled the end of her desperate earlier search for Heimat. At the same time, they also asserted the resilience of nostalgic bifocalism, in contradiction to her earliest poetic speculations. Written in the wake of such an about-face, the second poem extended the natural imagery even further. It opened with a description of a verdant island swathed in a protective cocoon of hills and sunshine: “All around green fields rimmed by hills/So peacefully bathed in golden sunshine,” rhapsodized Wunderlich. The building, she announced, rose exactly in this haven’s midst to serve as a singular and singularly peaceful purpose—looking. Breaking with the crusading imagery of her earlier verses, here the poet eschewed military similes or allusions. The tower’s surroundings were “peaceful” (friedvoll) and supposedly prosperous— “gilded by sunshine.”147 The completed project, after all, was much less a bastion than she had previously led her reader to believe: In the middle a tower, built solely from wood, Entrusted with neither weapons nor defenses, A tower just to look into the faraway land, The Heimat, beloved, from where we had been banished. [Inmitten ein Turm, aus Holz nur gebaut, Man hat weder Waffen noch Wehr ihm vertraut. Ein Turm, nur zu schauen ins weite Land, In die Heimat, die liebe, aus der wir verbannt!]

By making the “wish [to look] come true,” she added, the tower once again reconciled vision and image. Nostalgic bifocalism, if one is to be-

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lieve Wunderlich, was now more than a custom passed down from one generation to the next. Built into the structure of the new borderland sites such as Neualbenreuth, it was a feature constitutive of the area’s visual economy. Atop the tower’s platform, looking and dreaming were no longer mutually exclusive: The happy hour that we had missed for so long, Can can be easily afforded to us from now on. We can see Heimat once again And walk its familiar paths in our minds. [Die glückliche Stunde, die so lang wir entbehrt, Die wird uns von nun an gerne gewährt. Wir können die Heimat noch einmal seh’n Um im Geiste die Wege, die vertrauten, geh’n.]

Still, those who had left the insular world of Wunderlich’s poems to experience the tower’s physical interior found relatively few links to nature, since the tall stairwell shaft permitted only a rare glimpse of the outside. The most jarring contrast to Wunderlich’s description of unconstrained vision, however, was the large octagonal platform itself. Visitors recalled a packed space that restricted mobility, physical as well as visual, making it possible to look only through one window at a time. “The tower platform,” one traveler reminisced in 1963, “was densely occupied at every window. Everyone wanted to see a bit more from ‘over there,’ and with the help of good binoculars the Egerland was being pulled closer.”148 A participant in a summer fest organized by the Neualbenreuth office of the SdL observed that the “tower’s platform was extremely busy and the telescopes steadily surrounded by visitors; a sign that the interest in the ‘glance across the border’ showed no sign of abatement.”149 Photographs of expellees huddled shoulder-to-shoulder confi rmed the impression of a crammed space. But if the setting itself was not particularly intimate, its treatment of vision certainly was. In contrast to how drawings depicted “the look into the Heimat” (one of them placed an entire valley at the feet of a lone Sudeten German traveler), the designers of the Neualbenreuth tower helped visitors to edit the view (fig. 31). The latter were scarcely left alone in the face of panoramic vistas. In contrast to the earlier drawings, visitors to the tower did not have to shield their eyes to be able to look past a

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figure 31. Josef Rauscher, The Gaze into the Heimat. From HbPW 18, no. 215 (July 1966): 577. Courtesy of Verlag Heimatbrief für die Kreise Plan-Weseritz und Tepl-Petschau.

Czechoslovak watchtower or anxiously scan the area for landmarks. This was the labor accomplished by the platform windows. Window panes, it bears reminding, offer both transparency and protection; they connect as much as they separate.150 Standing in front of the glazed tower windows, Sudeten German travelers looked for shelter from Czechoslovak surveillance as much as undesirable views. These openings, as we shall see in a moment, made the premise of Adolf Huska’s sketch come to life. While real-life windows call to mind “unframed, unrepeatable, transient” impressions taken in by a mobile subject from a variety of changing vantage points, the Neualbenreuth tower was a gateway to a very different experience.151 Telescopes aimed at Heimat from behind eight three-window clusters, each located along one of the platform walls. The tower’s planners had drawn up a list of exactly which areas they wanted to make visible, including “the Fichtelgebirge, Egerland, Ore Mountains, and Steinwald.”152 Instead of offering an unbounded landscape to be surveyed in an all-encompassing 360-degree turn, as the setting might have initially suggested, the roofed and walled platform denatured, organized, and mediated the nostalgic viewer’s experience. From its windows, Sudeten Germans no longer mindlessly “stared into their native land,” as they may have done at an odd stop along the border.153 The glass panes were not merely optical frames, as they have been since modernity’s beginnings. Here, they assigned vision-specific vectors and set their territorial boundaries. The eye was not encouraged to roam freely: above each widow cluster was a brass plaque that named only one Heimat locale and thus steered vision in only one clearly designated direction (fig. 32). The windows physically fi ltered what the expellees were to see. Far from innocent ocular extensions, they established, manipulated, and enforced

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figure 32. “Eger,” a window plaque, Heimat Tower, Neualbenreuth. Photo by the author.

the new conventions of visuality in the Cold War borderlands, until then communicated in writings and photographs only.154 And their goal was not merely to circumscribe what ought to be looked at. They set even more exacting criteria for how looking would occur. On each plaque, the place names appeared in quotation marks—“Eger” rather than Eger—as if to suggest that one was looking not at a real-life town or village but at its representation. In short, at Neualbenreuth, the act of nostalgic looking was framed as a picture. The elision of difference between vision and image fueled nostalgic bifocalism still further. It then comes as no surprise that some travelers described the resulting views as immutable paintings (Gemälde) rather than physical scenes at the mercy of the seasons and weather conditions.155 Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise On Painting, a seminal text in the history of Western visuality, famously recommends that the pictorial surface should be delineated and imagined as a window that both delimits and unifies the subject matter. “I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish, which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint,” he instructs his Renaissance reader.156 And, indeed, as Anne Friedberg has pointed out, “Alberti’s Renaissance metaphor of the window has haunted centuries of subsequent thinking about the humanist project of perspective, and has remained a defi ning concept for theories of painting, architecture, and moving-image media.”157 Neualbenreuth, however, is important not merely for the fact of its dependence on and adoption of modernity’s ocularity for the purposes of nostalgic vi-

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sion across the Iron Curtain. Most notable is the tower’s blurred line between vision and picture—its approximation, against Wunderlich’s initial hopes, between the physical “look into the Heimat” and the wishful, arrested, or artfully composed “image of the Heimat.” If transparency, according to one of its many defi nitions, signifies “simultaneous perception of different spatial locations,” at Neualbenreuth it also included different temporalities.158 The conflation between vision and image at the tower condoned and even invited overlaps between past and present. In effect, Neualbenreuth’s tower promoted Emma Stifter’s manner of looking instead of correcting it. Its windows, as Anne Friedberg would say, were capable of producing increasingly virtual realities. Without being in the least technical (unless one considers the telescopes), these openings became “techniques” or devices that promoted a distinct “style” of looking.159 With their many prototypes and preconditions, “the look into the Heimat” and the larger framework of nostalgic bifocalism were hardly novel as such. Yet, their ritualized mass practice, on which Schroubek picked up, and their appearance in the Cold War context, where surveillance remains the prevalent term for describing the period’s visuality, certainly counted as new. Nostalgic bifocalism was not just a theoretical system discussed and described in writing. It was ingrained in the physical environment that allegedly served thousands. By letting vision and image overlap, Neualbenreuth’s windows cemented nostalgia’s visual regime, integral to the broader visual economy of the Cold War borderlands, and provided it with a physical foundation. Whereas earlier Iron Curtain visitors had rarely shared identical visual experiences, the tower contributed to the standardization of their impressions. It tipped the scale in favor of those who succumbed to picturelike afterimages. Indeed, a window in Emma Stifter’s room in Haidlfi ng could not have done a better job.

Epilogue Tragic Frames Dramatizations

B

etween May and September 1953, the office of the Senior Prosecutor in Düsseldorf received several complaints about the West German daily Der Mittag, the mouthpiece of Bonn’s staunchly conservative and anticommunist People’s Alliance for Peace and Freedom (Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit). The complaints pertained to the “gross distortion and dramatization of existing records” that had been published in a special issue of the paper on 25 April. They concerned a border incident so typical that it could have been invented, especially since the BBP had apparently taken no notice of it at all.1 In the area of the West German town of Kronach, two young BBP officers apprehended and then released a West German border crosser by the name of Müllner. As it turned out, Müllner had been in charge of a large East-West smuggling scheme. One of the border guards involved in the arrest, Werner Wegner, whose parents lived in East Germany, was soon shot dead while attempting to intercept a shipment of Müllner’s illegal cargo. The problem was not so much that Der Mittag had printed a possibly uncorroborated story, but how it had done it. The Senior Prosecutor’s correspondence shows that he was mostly in touch with various BBP officials, all of whom expressed their concern with the narrative’s delivery rather than its content. They insisted that the newspaper had grossly exaggerated what had happened in its retelling of the events: it rendered the participants as the personifications of good and evil, and described the ensuing chase in a manner worthy of a fi lm noir. There was the alarmist title, “Alert at the Zonal Border: Hot Battle in the Cold War.” There was

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the undeniably villainous Müllner—a smuggler and, no doubt, a communist. There was the innocent, virtuous, and loyal Wegner, steadfast even in the face of his complex fi lial allegiance to his East German parents. There was even a signature flashback moment when Wegner recognized the smuggler from a visit to the parents’ village, where he had seen Müllner rub shoulders with East German People’s Police cadres (Vopos). In short, the complaints alleged, instead of reporting on the “recorded events,” the newspaper had fabricated a “dramatization”; it had substituted a stylized plot for a factual account. The Icon Curtain has drawn attention to the techniques of such emplotment, in texts and images alike. Obviously, such storytelling devices were put to use not only in tales of incidents at the inter-German border. And although such means can be (and have been) employed to account for any liminal space, there are significant reasons to explain why they persisted, and even expanded, in the Cold War context. As I have shown in chapters 1 and 3, the Cold War was a confl ict difficult to animate, especially along the western edge of the Iron Curtain. A standoff “by no means conventional,” it has been described as “a state of extreme tension between the superpowers, stopping short of all-out war but characterized by mutual hostility and involvement in covert warfare and war by proxy.” 2 Rather than unfolding in one or several cohesive theaters of action, as “hot” wars commonly do, the Cold War was “a series of distant events played out on the frontiers of Europe or remote flashpoints.”3 Some scholars have even argued that it was not a political confrontation at all, but rather a diffuse yet “all-encompassing horizon of experience and expectation” defi ned by that which had not happened even more than by that which had.4 Its status has been so uncertain that twenty-five years after its supposed end there is still lack of consensus about whether there even was a Cold War, let alone when it occured. 5 Even in the United States, the supposed victor, the war remains the only major twentieth-century confl ict for which the US Department of Defense does not award an official medal. Speculations on the mounting tensions between Russia and the US in 2014 have recently accentuated such uncertainties. Given these contingencies, it is hardly surprising that dramatization has propelled numerous Cold War stories, told then and now, among them countless accounts of the Iron Curtain drama. But the confl ict’s questionable “eventfulness” was not the only reason for the ever more intense pigments with which the era’s impressions became tinged. Some

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contemporaries argued that even the most graphic and widely familiar anecdotes—above all, those associated with the Berlin Wall in the fi rst years of its existence—came short of leaving a mark on their audiences’ hearts and minds. They bemoaned the fact that narratives about escapes from behind the Iron Curtain no longer touched people as deeply as they ought to. These masterminds of Western propaganda noted that the Cold War played out in an age of empathy deficit and refugee fatigue. “The long history of aggressions and oppressions of recent years, and the number of times that the plight of refugees has been dramatized in many areas, regrettably tends to work against efforts to rouse sharp sympathy for today’s victims,” observed officials of the Free Europe Committee, RFE’s parent organization, in a confidential memorandum on publicizing the Berlin Wall across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Only the most “emotion-rousing material,” in their opinion, stood a chance of closing the gap.6 Such worries explain why, since then, references to tragedy have enlivened the border as the European frontline in a confl ict that has been described as a mere rehearsal for a (luckily for everyone) indefi nitely deferred performance.7 Cold War contemporaries and present-day scholars alike have consistently mobilized human loss, resistance, and endurance—the hallmarks of all stage tragedies—to narrate the Cold War against the grain of its ostensible non-eventfulness on the Continent. Fratricide, parental sacrifice, spousal (dis)loyalty, bodies writhing in barbed wire—in short, Europe’s Cold War–era pathos formulas—have been assimilated into the vocabulary of the border.8 They foregrounded the icons that gave rise to the icon curtain, molding it into the prayer wall as years went by. Just as with the letters to Düsseldorf’s Senior Prosecutor in the wake of Werner Wegner’s death, the Sudeten German sources interpreted in this book show that people in close physical proximity to the confl ict developed not only strategies for coping, they also came up with narrative pitches for recounting the standoff’s details. Among these, the “tragic” pitch prevailed. More than that: as Europeans sought to inscribe the Cold War within the existing imaginary of “hot” wars, the tragic pitch became the tragic imperative. The sources that are the backbone of this study took shape under pressure from the above imperative to represent the Iron Curtain as the standoff’s prime hot spot and capture the location’s urgency, not always obvious to the naked eye. This pressure was somewhat less palpable in Berlin, where journalists and press-accredited photographers made the

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icons of the Wall world-famous within hours—people like Conrad Schumann, the East German border guard who was photographed jumping over the dividing coils of barbed wire on 15 August 1961, or Peter Fechter, the eighteen-year-old bricklayer who was left to bleed in the no man’s land on 17 August 1962. The said pressure may have been less critical along the inter-German border, frequently featured on the news thanks to its unprecedentedness and brutality. Yet, it certainly caught up with those who wanted to draw attention to the border between Czechoslovakia and West Germany. On the one hand, the forest canopy promised a “nefarious world” à la Schiller or Pocock.9 On the other hand, it disappointed such expectations, as the green cover masked rather than exposed the “death strip fantasies” of human loss and mayhem.10 For this border’s representations, striking the tragic note was a challenge, not a given. In response to this challenge, the resulting vignettes of suffering arose primarily not from real-life incidents but from a second-degree order of representation. As I foreshadowed in my introduction, this version of suffering was realist, located “in close proximity to [the] world,” much more than it was real, reflecting the actual human casualties and misfortunes that inevitably occurred along the border.11 Still more precisely, it could be characterized as tragic realist. Expanding upon Erich Auerbach’s concept, John Orr interprets tragic realism as a narrative attempt to accommodate upheaval and lend it some structure, to mark the dissolution of an earlier social order while fumbling in search for the next.12 Precisely these kinds of tragic realist impulses aided the assimilation of rupture—the project at the heart of the prayer wall. Most vividly, these impulses transpired in photographs of destruction (chapter 1) and in images of the suffering Jesus (chapter 2)—staples of earlier periods now appropriated to cement the icon curtain and condition its physical landscape. In the service of tragic realism, the artifacts and creative forms that fed each of this book’s chapters submitted to a structure that both contained and organized their content: the frame. Thus, we see the framing of the Cold War ruin as wartime rubble (chapter 1), of an ordinary religious image as an extraordinary artifact (chapter 2), of misleading memories of the past as narrative digression (chapter 3), and of vision as picture (chapter 4). A shared structural component, frames helped shape perceptions of the confl ict and its European frontline early on. Their use gave the makers of vernacular texts and images a sense of control, no

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matter how illusory, both over the works that they were putting forth and over that which these works depicted. By contributing to the physical appearance of the divide’s environs, by inscribing its experiences and stories within the established representational canon, and by including the fracture in familiar rituals and practices, those who engaged with the Cold War rift attempted to render it physically, perceptually, emotionally, and intellectually accessible, and hence surmountable. If the confl ict’s frontline could be subjected to a rhyme or brushstroke, if it could fit into a snapshot, it was less of an incomprehensible “monstrosity.”13

Purveyors of the Frontline Such conclusions suggest that any analysis of the Cold War border that excludes artifacts and their circulation is inevitably incomplete. The same applies to the now decades-old effort to capture the complexity of the expellee presence in Germany in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries—or rather, the frequent resistance to acknowledging this complexity. While politics remains integral for understanding expellee cultures—and there were many14—the proverbial “lobby” only scratches the surface of their story. First of all, the expellee lobby, just like the Iron Curtain, is another misleading monolith. Not only did expellee groups come from widely divergent backgrounds. Each group, as with any slice of any society, demonstrated multiple and, at times, confl icting interests and sensibilities. In other words, professional politicians heading the SdL did not necessarily have much in common with Emma Stifter, Sepp Skalitzky, or the rank-and-fi le contributors to the homeland leaflets. Second, the lobby’s thrust, as mentioned earlier, remains circumscribed to a few keywords—“Heimat,” “revisionism,” and “the inability to confront the past”—important but already well explored in recent interdisciplinary discussions of Germans as victims (Opferdebatte).15 Academics involved in these discussions, many of them literary scholars, have, for their part, maintained a carefully edited list of readings and viewings on the topic.16 By and large, it includes the works of writers and fi lmmakers who were already accepted into the current German canon. This list privileges works that document the fl ight and expulsion of Germans from Europe’s East at the cost of those which chronicle the aftermath of such upheaval. Needless to say, it also leaves out the work of the self-professed expellees. A persistent distinction between the nos-

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talgic or revisionist “expellee literature” (Vertriebenenliteratur) and the critical “expulsion literature” (Vertreibungsliteratur) further excuses the lack of interest in the former, feeding into the aforementioned restrictive approach. By and large, the prose of “the other expellees”—well-known German writers such as Horst Bienek, Peter Härtling, Siegfi red Lenz, or Günter Grass—remains the yardstick for the kind of expellee narratives that merit public attention.17 Developed, oddly enough, in an age when few ventured to doubt the salience of mass, street, or popular culture, this separation between the “high” and the “low” has meant that, after more than a decade of intense debate, we still know very little about the writings or viewings of those who have self-identified as expellees.18 Demshuk’s historical study, which utilizes material from expelled Silesians as its primary sources, is a notable breakthrough in this regard.19 By analyzing the Sudeten German networks patched together by Hans Watzlick and his junior fellowbards, and moving on to the networks of their readers and admirers, The Icon Curtain has sought to fi ll in some of these gaps. Rather than focusing on state-sponsored or canon-driven, top-down iconographies of expellee life (likewise, only recently exposed in several important studies of the 1950s), this book sheds light on the artifacts produced within the Sudeten German milieu itself. 20 Historians have long maintained that the descent of the Iron Curtain was inextricable from the fates of the German expellees. 21 This book’s focus on Sudeten German sources from the Cold War era pushes this observation beyond the chronological constraints of the mid- to late 1940s, and beyond the simple framework of political cause and effect. Their postwar fates aside, we can count the creators of these works—individuals who had crafted an Iron Curtain float for a local parade as early as 1950—among the makers of key Cold War icons. 22 Of course, there is little doubt that not enlisted in their ranks are Erich Frieds, James Rosenquists, Ben Shahns, and other comparable atomic-age greats. Yet, from the viewpoint of the period’s cultural history, Sudeten Germans were neither a mere carry-over from the wartime years nor simply another pressure group. To position them vis-à-vis the Cold War issues relevant to all of Europe, The Icon Curtain has taken off their “provincial dress.” 23 Indeed, long before historians, under Theodor Schieder, set out to document postwar expulsions, professional ethnographers such as Karasek-Langer, enthralled by these ethnic Germans’ everyday rituals, burials, costumes,

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Epilogue

songs, and fairy tales, had enveloped expellees in the thick air of folkloricity that has shrouded them ever since.24 Representatives of this contingent’s various groups remain to this day known primarily for their compulsive penchant for portraying “idyllic, self-contained rural settings.” 25 And yet their culture is as irreducible to the “ethnic ways and customs” as it is to political lobbyism. In the Cold War it spilled over the boundaries of the “ghetto of the expellee regional associations” as soon as their members tapped into the era’s widespread anxieties. 26 For this reason, The Icon Curtain positions these newcomers not as custodians of an introspective, “closed culture, the public resonance of which [has] remained negligible and limited to official events,” but as fomenters of Western Cold War fears, walking examples of the tangled East-West affi nities, and dedicated purveyors of the confl ict’s frontline. 27 As combat archeologists and preservationists ask what constitutes today’s physical legacy of the Cold War in Europe, Sudeten German landmarks, texts, and images will help answer this question more fully. 28

Acknowledgments

T

his book began to take shape in conversations with Elisabeth Fendl, who generously shared her contacts and knowledge of the Czech– German borderlands when I needed them the most. Leslie A. Adelson and Isabel V. Hull at Cornell University offered encouragement and indispensable comments on the earliest drafts, and Martin Schulze Wessel at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich was kind to sponsor the German part of this research in its beginning stages. Colleen Boggs at the Fannie and Alan Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College championed the manuscript’s campus review, skillfully organized by Isabel Weatherdon. I could not have wished for better readers than Frank Biess, Kristin Kopp, Gerd Gemünden, Mona Domosh, and Silvia Spitta. Their interdisciplinary perspective and versatile recommendations left a mark on every aspect of the Icon Curtain, from title to structure. Invaluable fi nancial support came from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Andrew D. Mellon Foundation/Society for the Humanities at Cornell University; the Sonderforschungsbereich Erinnerungskulturen at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); and at Dartmouth College, a travel grant from John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, a Constance Burke Research Initiation Award, and a Junior Faculty Fellowship. With Adrian Randolph’s help, a subvention from Dartmouth’s Dean of Faculty Office settled the costs of reproducing the more than thirty images included here. In Germany, I owe gratitude to many dedicated archivists and local custodians, among them Renate Herget, Ingrid Sauer, and Michael Puchta at Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munich; Christian Pleßl at

242

Acknowledgments

Bayerisches Staatsarchiv Amberg; Herbert Wurster at Archiv des Bistums Passau; Manfred Pranghofer at Archiv des Böhmerwaldmuseums Passau; Reverend Thomas Vogl and Robert Treml at the archive of Katholisches Stadtpfarramt Waldsassen; and Paul Mai and his coworkers at Bischöfl isches Zentralarchiv Regensburg. The staffs of the Sudetendeutsches Wörterbuch at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, the Johannes-Künzig-Institut für ostdeutsche Volkskunde in Freiburg, and the Collegium Carolinum Library in Munich provided essential help with the Sudeten German periodicals. Albert Köstler, the mayor of Neualbenreuth, and Günther Bauernfeind of Landratsamt Cham graciously passed on to me several difficult-to-track publications. Stateside, Rory Grennan at the University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign, and the staff at the Library and Archives at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, patiently helped with the sources related to Radio Free Europe’s activities at the Iron Curtain. Vast amounts of feedback and inspiration came from friends and colleagues. Anna Parkinson has been a one-of-a-kind academic soul mate and kindred spirit. To David Bathrick I am grateful for his tremendous intellectual generosity and openness. Many participants in his 2008 DAAD Faculty Summer Seminar—Karen Achberger, Tina Gerhardt, Emily Godbey, Elke Heckner, Eric Kligerman, Susanne Luhmann, Daniel Magilow, Brian Puaca, Susanne Vees-Gulani—remain interlocutors and occasional dinner companions. I owe very special thanks to SvenErik Rose for his careful readings of and thoughtful suggestions for what would become chapter 1. Neither life nor this book would be complete without Veronique Plesch’s friendship, passion for teaching, and contagious interest in the gruesome side of Christian iconography. Over the years, exchanges with Astrid Eckert, Valentina Glajar, and Lora Wildenthal have kept me on my toes. Kelly Arnold, Alexander Badenoch, Joshua Dittrich, John Namjun Kim, Torben Lohmüller, Laure Marcellesi, Stanka Radovic´, Dorian Stuber, Marianne Tettlebaum, Victoria Somoff, Anna Tesmenitsky, and Adelheid Voskuhl have been the source of much-needed humor and empathy. In Gießen, Allmuth Hammer, Andreas Langenohl, and Salomon Salzborn extended their welcome during my month-long visit in 2004. I have been luckier than words can say to have brilliant, dedicated, and understanding colleagues at the Department of German Studies at Dartmouth. It would have been impossible to complete this book without the mentorship and hands-on help from Bruce Duncan, Veronika

Acknowledgments

243

Fuechtner, Gerd Gemünden, Irene Kacandes, Klaus Mladek, and Ellis Shookman. Konrad Kenkel and Jocelyne Kolb, as well as Ulrike Rainer, looked out for me in less cheerful times. Most recently, Petra McGillen’s wit, enthusiasm, and courage have been an inspiration. Peter C. Allen at the Map Room of Dartmouth’s Baker-Berry Library helped select and scan the maps, and Calder Bragdon Fong’s considerable digital skills made them come alive with names of villages too obscure for the originals. I am particularly indebted to Abby Collier and Mary Laur of the University of Chicago Press for taking an interest in the project and expertly steering it through its many changes. The feedback I received from the Press’s two anonymous readers, in addition to reader comments graciously shared by LeAnn Fields at the University of Michigan Press, translated into a wealth of new viewpoints and proved just how much there is still to learn. Ruth Steinberg’s edits brought polish and greater clarity to the narrative. The Press’s professional team, especially Nicholas Lilly, Mark Reschke, and Logan Smith, made the rest a smooth sailing for me. Parts of this book have been presented at the College Art Association Conference (2005), the German Studies Association Conferences (2006), and the American Comparative Association Conference (2008). A briefer version of chapter 1 appeared in New German Critique 38:112 (2011). Last but not least, I thank my parents, Nina Komska and Grigori Komski, for their unconditional support and a healthy dose of skepticism, and Byron Breese for helping juggle work and parenting. I look forward to sharing all I have with Lev and Ada, for whom the Cold War will (hopefully) remain in the remote twentieth century.

Archives Archiv des Bistums Passau (BZA–P) Bischöfl iches Zentralarchiv Regensburg (BZA–R) PfaW

Pfarrei Waldsassen

Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Munich (BayHSta) GrPro

Grenzpolizei

MInn

Ministerium des Inneren

PrGP

Präsidium der Grenzpolizei

PrLP

Präsidium der Landespolizei

StK

Staatskanzlei

Bayerisches Staatsarchiv Amberg (BaySta–A) GrPoI–FiW–F

Grenzpolizeiinspektion Furth im Wald, Fotosammlung

Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University RFE/RL

Corporate Records

Johannes-Künzig-Institut für Ostdeutsche Volkskunde, Freiburg/Breisgau (JKI) SK

Sammlung Karasek

Pfarrarchiv Neualbenreuth (PfaArch–N) MFr

Maria Frieden

Archiv Katholisches Stadtpfarramt Waldsassen (PfaArch–W) GH

Geschändeter Heiland

Stadtarchiv Passau/Archiv des Böhmerwaldmuseums, Passau (StArchPa/ArchBö) NSka

Nachlass Skalitzky (uncatalogued)

University of Illinois Archives, Urbana-Champaign (UIA)

Notes Introduction 1. Patrick Wright, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 74; Louis James, “Frankenstein’s Monster in Two Traditions,” in Frankenstein, Creation, and Monstrosity, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), 93. 2. Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His Men (London: C. Chapple, 1813), 18. On the scenic use of Eastern European backdrops, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 106–13. 3. Bayerischer Wald: Berge—Wälder—Seen zwischen Regensburg und Passau (Munich: Fiedler, 1989), 81; Josef Wenzig and Johann Krejcˇí, Böhmerwald: Natur und Mensch (1860; repr. Passau: Robert Baierl, 1996), 1. 4. Katharina Eisch, Grenze: Eine Ethnographie des bayerisch-böhmischen Grenzraums (Munich: Kommission für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 1996), 118–26. 5. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), 87, 129. 6. Selected works on the German investment in borders include Pieter Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Étienne François, Jörg Seifarth, and Bernhard Struck, eds., Die Grenze als Raum, Erfahrung und Konstruktion: Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2007); Annemarie H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); and Mark Cornwall, The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist Mission of Heinz Rutha (Cam-

248

notes to pages 5–8

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). On the myth of the “German forest,” see, among others, Albrecht Lehmann, Von Menschen und Bäumen: Die Deutschen und ihr Wald (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1999); Albrecht Lehmann, “Der deutsche Wald,” in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ed. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 3:187–200; Johannes Zechner, Völkisch und national: Zur Aktualität alter Denkmuster im 21. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), 179–94; Ursula Breymayer and Bernd Ulrich, eds., Unter Bäumen: Die Deutschen und der Wald (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2011); and Jeffrey K. Wilson, The German Forest: Nature, Identity, and the Contestation of a National Symbol, 1871–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012). 7. Wright, Iron Curtain, 376. 8. Simone Derix, “Der Wald als Bühne der Macht,” in Breymayer and Ulrich, Unter Bäumen, 201. 9. Denis Cosgrove, Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 1–2. 10. Johann Pezzl, Reise durch den Baierischen Kreis (Salzburg, 1784), 22–23. 11. Thomas Lindenberger, “Divided, but Not Disconnected: Germany as a Border Region in the Cold War,” in Divided, but Not Disconnected: German Experiences of the Cold War, ed. Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht, and Andrew Plowman (New York : Berghahn Books, 2010), 14; Berthold Molden, “The Cold War in the European Memory Matrix,” in Clashes in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust, ed. Muriel Blaive, Christian Gerbel, and Thomas Lindenberger (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2011), 212. 12. Nuala C. Johnson, Ireland, The Great War, and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10. 13. “Freedom kit,” December 1953, record series 13/2/207, box 675 new, UIA. See also Maren Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten: Erinnerungslandschaft deutschdeutsche Grenze (Berlin: Aufbau, 2006), 100–102, 107–11. 14. On political realism, see, among others, Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 310–11. On the Cold War as a “nonevent,” see Michael Beschloss, “Missile Defense,” New York Times, 1 October 2009, http://www .nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Beschloss-t.html. 15. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 147. 16. Astrid Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border’: Tourism to the Iron Curtain in West Germany,” Zeithistorische Forschungen 8, no. 1 (2011): 4. 17. József Lugosi, “Keine Grenze wie jede andere,” in Der Eiserne Vorhang: Katalog zur Sonderausstellung (Vienna: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, 2001), 83–95. 18. Caitlin Murdock, Changing Places: Society, Culture, and Territory in the

notes to pages 9–12

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Saxon-Bohemian Borderlands, 1870–1946 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 15. 19. Patrick Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 286. 20. Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” in Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York: Chelsea Publishers), 8:7286 (fi rst quotation); Andrea Komlosy, “The Marshall Plan and the Making of the ‘Iron Curtain’ in Austria,” in The Marshall Plan in Austria, ed. Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka, and Dieter Stiefel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 99 (second quotation). See also Christian Koller, “Der ‘Eiserne Vorhang’: Zur Genese einer politischen Zentralmetapher in der Epoche des Kalten Krieges,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 54, no. 4 (2006): 372. 21. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publishers, 2005), 9. 22. Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. Criticism of the Berlin Wall as an “overdetermined” Cold War site appears in Sagi Shafer, “Hidden Behind the Wall: West German State Building and the Emergence of the Iron Curtain,” Central European History 44, no. 3 (2011): 506; Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5; and Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 2. 23. Eisch, Grenze, 102. See also, among others, Lindenberger, “Divided, but Not Disconnected”; Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011); Shafer, Ironing the Curtain: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011); and Jason Johnson, Dividing Mödlareuth: The Incorporation of Half a German Village into the GDR Regime, 1945–1989 (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2011). Eckert’s work so far refers to the Czech–Bavarian border but does not discuss its similarities or differences to the inter- German divide. 24. Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 167. 25. Lindenberger, “Divided, but Not Disconnected,” 12; Molden, “The Cold War,” 214. 26. Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 4. 27. For a quantifying comparison, see Petra Mayrhofer, “‘Eiserner Vorhang’: Bildaufsatz der Ikone ‘Eiserner Vorhang,’” in Online-Modul Europäisches Politisches Bildgedächtnis. Ikonen und Ikonographien des 20. Jahrhunderts (September 2009), http://www.demokratiezentrum.org/themen/europa/europaeisches -bildgedaechtnis/eiserner-vorhang.html. 28. Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 254. 29. Shafer, Ironing the Curtain, 10. ˇ eskoslovenská 30. See, e.g., Alena Jílková and Tomáš Jílek, Železná opona: C státní hranice od Jáchymova po Bratislavu, 1948–1989 (Prague: Baset, 2006);

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notes to pages 12–13

Martin Pulec, “Die Bewachung der tschechoslowakischen Westgrenze zwischen 1945 und 1989,” in Die Tschechoslowakei 1945/48 bis 1989, ed. Pavel Žácˇek, Bernd Faulenbach, and Ulrich Mählert (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2008), 513–43; Muriel Blaive and Berthold Molden, Grenzfälle: Österreichische und tschechische Erfahrungen am Eisernen Vorhang (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz, 2009); Markus A. Meinke, ed., Die tschechisch-bayerische Grenze im Kalten Krieg in vergleichender Perspektive: Politische, ökonomische und soziokulturelle Dimensionen (Regensburg: Stadtarchiv Regensburg, 2011); Eagle Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 1 (2006): 65–92; Andreas Wiedemann,” Komm, lass uns das Grenzland aufbauen”: Ansiedlung und neue Strukturen in den ehemaligen Sudetengebieten, 1945–1952 (Essen: Klartext, 2007); David Gerlach, “Beyond Expulsions: The Emergence of ‘Unwanted Elements’ in Postwar Czech Borderlands, 1945–1950,” East European Politics and Societies 24, no. 2 (2010): 269–93; Mateˇj Spurný, Nejsou ˇ eská spolecˇnost a menšiny v pohranicˇí (1945–1960) (Prague: Antijako my: C komplex, 2012); Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Unifi cation and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Maruška Svašek, “Borders and Emotions,” Ethnologia Europaea 30, no. 2 (2000): 111–26; and Shafer, “Hidden Behind the Wall.” 31. Lindenberger, “Divided, but Not Disconnected,” 11–14. 32. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 217 (fi rst quotation); Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 3 (second quotation). 33. Shafer, Ironing the Curtain, 7–8; Eisch, Grenze, 107–8. 34. Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2008), 8; Wilfried Loth, “The Cold War: What It Was About and Why It Ended,” in Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965–1985, ed. Paul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010), 20. 35. Most recently, in Peter Schneider, “Tearing Down Berlin’s Mental Wall,” New York Times, 12 August 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/opinion/ tearing-down-berlins-mental-wall.html?_r=2&. 36. Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2008), 9. 37. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 22–23. 38. Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb,” in Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 13. 39. Jonathan M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of GermanJewish Identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 10.

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40. Martha Langford and John Langford, A Cold War Tourist and His Camera (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2011), 8. 41. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, introduction to Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War, ed. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3. 42. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 6–7. 43. Robert Luft, “‘Alte Grenzen’ und Kulturgeographie: Zur historischen Konstanz der Grenzen Böhmens und der böhmischen Länder,” in Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Aktuelle Forschungsprobleme, ed. Hans Lemberg (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2000), 95. 44. Manfred Pranghofer, Böhmerwaldmuseum Passau (Passau: Verein Böhmerwaldmuseum Passau, 2009), 10; Eisch, Grenze, 44. 45. Reinhold Balk, “Die Grenze zwischen Bayern und Böhmen: Anmerkungen zur Geschichte,” in Grenzenlos, ed. Franz Amberger (Straubing: Verlag Attenkofer, 2000), 189–90. 46. Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn, “Between ‘Heimat’ and ‘Expulsion’: The Construction of the Sudeten German ‘Volksgruppe’ in Post-War Germany,” in Power and the People: A Social History of Central European Politics, 1945– 1956, ed. Eleonor Breuning, Jill Lewis, and Gareth Pritchard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 79–95; Tobias Weger, “Volkstumskampf” ohne Ende? Sudetendeutsche Organisationen, 1945–1955 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2008). 47. Seminal accounts include Radomir Luža, The Transfer of the Sudeten Germans: A Study of Czech–German Relations, 1933–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 1964); Eagle Glassheim, “National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945,” Central European History 33, no. 4 (2000): 463–86; Tomáš Staneˇk, Verfolgung 1945: Die Stellung der Deutschen in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien (ausserhalb der Lager und Gefängnisse), trans. Otfrid Pustejovsky (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002); Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborateurs in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). For an Englishlanguage overview of Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Germans, see Jürgen Tampke, Czech–German Relations and the Politics of Central Europe: From Bohemia to the EU (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 48. Wiedemann, “Komm, lass uns das Grenzland aufbauen,” 28. A historical sketch of changing place names appears in Murdock, Changing Places, 14. 49. Rudolf Urban, Die sudetendeutsche Gebiete nach 1945 (Frankfurt/Main:

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A. Metzner, 1964); Pulec, “Die Bewachung der tschechoslowakischen Westgrenze,” 133. 50. Komlosy, “The Marshall Plan,” 114. 51. Technical details appear in Pulec, “Die Bewachung der tschechoslowakischen Westgrenze,” 142–44; and Balk, “Die Grenze zwischen Bayern und Böhmen,” 16–24. 52. Erik K. Franzen, Der vierte Stamm Bayerns: Die Schirmherrschaft über die Sudetendeutschen, 1954–1974 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010), 39; Andreas Kossert, Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2008), 60; Tampke, Czech–German Relations, 129. 53. Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migrations and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 115. 54. Salomon Salzborn, Grenzenlose Heimat: Geschichte, Gegenwart und Zukunft der Vertriebenenverbände (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 2000); Bernd Stöver, “Pressure Group im Kalten Krieg: Die Vertriebenen, die USA und der Kalte Krieg, 1947–1990,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 53, no. 10 (2005): 899–900. 55. Weger, “Volkstumskampf,” 517. On the expellee assessment of such periodicals, see Margarete Kubelka, “Heimatbriefe,” Marienbad-Tepler Heimatbrief 35, no. 409 (October 1982): 678–79. 56. Demshuk, The Lost German East, 27. 57. Ibid., 27. 58. Lora Wildenthal, The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 8. On the expellee Heimat, see, among others, Brenda Melendy, In Search of Heimat: Crafting Expellee Identity in the West German Context, 1949–1961 (PhD diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 1998); and Pascal Maeder, Forging a New Heimat: Expellees in Post-War West Germany and Canada (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2011). On the “expellee lobby,” see Pertti Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Matthias Stickler, “Ostdeutsch heißt gesamtdeutsch”: Organisation, Selbstverständnis und heimatpolitische Zielsetzungen der deutschen Vertriebenenverbänden (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004); and Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn, Die Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern (Padeborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010). 59. Katharina Eisch, “‘Doch die Erinnerung, die bleibt mir stets gewiß’: Bilder und Inszenierungen der verschlossenen Böhmerwald-Heimat,” in Zur Ikonographie des Heimwehs: Erinnerungskultur von Heimatvertriebenen, ed. Elisabeth Fendl (Freiburg: Johannes-Künzig-Institut für ostdeutsche Volkskunde, 2002), 30. 60. Debra J. Allen, The Oder-Neisse Line: The United States, Poland, and Germany in the Cold War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 168.

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61. Manfred Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen: Der historische deutsche Osten in der Erinnerung der Bundesrepublik (1961–1982) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 81–90; Alice Weinreb, “Cooking the Lost Heimat in West Germany of the 1950s and 1960s,” German Studies Review 34, no. 2 (2011): 351–56. 62. Ernst Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt/Egerland Once and Now/Egerland autrefois et à present (Geislingen: Egerland-Verlag, 1959), 273. 63. Detlef Arens, “Zwischen Waldnutzung und Waldanschauung: Von deutscher Forstwissenschaft und Waldromantik,” in Breymayer and Ulrich, Unter Bäumen, 55–62. 64. Bernhard Grueber and Adalbert Müller, Der bayrische Wald (Böhmerwald) (Regensburg, 1846), 39. 65. Ferdinand von Hochstetter, “Bericht über den Vortrag in der Geologischen Reichsanstalt,” quoted in Georg Pfl igersdorffer, Der Böhmerwald in Schilderungen der Stifterzeit (Linz: Adalbert-Stifter-Institut des Landes Österreich, 1977), 46. 66. Viktoria Urmersbach, Im Wald, da sind die Räuber: Eine Kulturgeschichte des Waldes (Berlin: Vergangenheitsverlag, 2009), 41. 67. Ursula Breymayer and Bernd Ulrich, “Unter Bäumen: Ein Zwischenreich,” 20, in Breymayer and Ulrich, Unter Bäumen (fi rst quotation); Bayerischer und Böhmerwald: Regensburg, Passau, Linz, Budweis, Pilsen (Leipzig and Vienna: Bibliographisches Institut, 1913), 25 (second quotation). 68. Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora, High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice, and Science (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 6. 69. Wenzig and Krejcˇí, Böhmerwald, 2. 70. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 4. 71. Wenzig and Krejcˇí, Böhmerwald, 6, 2. On propagating the advantages of the area’s civilizational lag, see Konrad Köstlin, “Grenzland-Tourismus,” in Grenzgänge: Streifzüge durch den Bayerischen Wald, ed. Josef Berliner (Passau: Andreas-Haller-Verlag, 1985), 41; Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 143; and Jörg Haller, “Wald Heil!”: Der Bayerische Wald-Verein und die kulturelle Entwicklung der ostbayerischen Grenzregion 1883 bis 1945 (Grafenau: Morsak, 1995), 41. 72. Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 150. 73. Hans Watzlik, Grüner deutscher Böhmerwald (Bayreuth: Gauverlag, 1940), 10. 74. Köstlin, “Grenzland-Tourismus,” 47; Haller, “Wald Heil!” 159–363. 75. Bayerischer und Böhmerwald, 1, 25. 76. Köstlin, “Grenzland-Tourismus,” 45; Haller, “Wald Heil!” 27. 77. August Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald: Landschaft, Geschichte, Kultur, Kunst (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1959), 10.

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78. Pranghofer, Böhmerwaldmuseum Passau, 12. 79. Berdahl, Where the World Ended; Shafer, “Hidden Behind the Wall,” 509, 521–23. 80. Viktor Karell, Hans Watzlik: Einführung in Leben und Werk (Bad Homburg: Verlag das Viehgespann, 1959), 7. 81. Karell, Hans Watzlik, 12–13; Weger, “Volkstumskampf,” 230. 82. On Watzlick’s Nazi past, see Weger, “Volkstumskampf,” 497–98. 83. See Watzlik’s Böhmerwald-Sagen (Budweis: Verlagsanstalt Moldavia, 1921); Mein Wuldaland! Erzählungen, Geschichte, Aufsätze (Oberplan: Verlag des Vereines Böhmerwaldmuseum, 1925); Böhmerwaldsagen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1929), respectively. 84. Gustav Jungbauer, Böhmerwald-Sagen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1924), 3–4. 85. Watzlik, Böhmerwaldsagen, 3–4. 86. Watzlik, Grüner deutscher Böhmerwald, 5. 87. Ibid., 7–8. 88. Karell, Hans Watzlik, 11; Watzlik to Sepp Skalitzky, 26 October 1946, StArchPa/ArchBö–NSka. 89. Watzlik to Skalitzky, 8 June 1947 and 6 November 1948, StArchPa/ ArchBö–NSka. 90. Watzlik to Skalitzky, 17 March 1948, StArchPa/ArchBö–NSka. 91. Watzlik to Skalitzky, 6 November 1948, StArchPa/ArchBö–NSka. 92. Skalitzky, “Das zweite Ich des Dichters Hans Watzlik. Im Gedenken an seine Frau Lina, geborene Pasche, 22.12.1964,” unpublished manuscript, StArchPa/ArchBö–NSka. 93. A selection of these authors’ forest-themed books includes Leo Hans Mally, Der alte Böhmerwald: Erzähltes und Erinnertes (Deggendorf: Verlag Josef Nothaft, 1961); Karl Winter, Böhmerwold! Hoamatlond!: Gedichte in der Mundart des mittleren Böhmerwaldes (Mühldorf/Obb.: D. Geiger, 1954); and Sepp Skalitzky, Herzschlag des Waldes: Ein Heimat- und Heimwehbüchlein für die heimatlosen Böhmerwäldler (Hintereben: Webinger, 1950).

Chapter One 1. Rudolf Kiefner, Passion jenseits des Böhmerwaldes im südlichen Egerland—der Kreis Bischofsteinitz (Felsberg: Karl Strube, 1991); Wolf-Dieter Hamperl, Die verschwundenen Dörfer (Altenmarkt: Mediform, 2004); Reinhold Fink, Zerstörte Böhmerwaldorte (Nordstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2006). 2. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005), 10; Frank Biess, introduction to Histories of the Aftermath: The Lega-

notes to pages 34–37

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cies of the Second World War in Europe, ed. Frank Biess and Robert G. Moeller (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 1. 3. Kerstin Barndt, “‘Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures’: Industrial Ruins in the Postindustrial Landscapes in Germany,” in Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 270. 4. Klaus Naumann, “Die Frage nach dem Ende: Von der unbestimmten Dauer der Nachkriegszeit,” Mittelweg 36 8 (February/March 1999): 21. 5. Naumann, “Einleitung,” in Nachkrieg in Deutschland, ed. Klaus Naumann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), 11. 6. Norman Naimark, “The Persistence of ‘the Postwar’: Germany and Poland,” in Biess and Moeller, Histories of the Aftermath, 14, 18, 27. 7. Judt, Postwar, 2; Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 242. 8. Wright, Iron Curtain, 16–17; Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create a Post–Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 13; Matthew Connelly, “Taking off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Confl ict during the Algerian War of Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 789–69. 9. Dieter Felbick, Schlagwörter der Nachkriegszeit, 1945–1949 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 356. The terms’ synonymous use is evident in Judt, Postwar, and Steege, Black Market, Cold War. 10. Robert Moeller, “The Politics of the Past in the 1950s: Rhetorics of Victimization in East and West Germany,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 39. 11. Biess, introduction to Histories of the Aftermath, 2–3. 12. Jörg Arnold, “‘Kassel 1943 mahnt . . .’: Zur Genealogie der Angst im Kalten Krieg,” in Angst im Kalten Krieg, ed. Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Dierk Walter (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009), 468. 13. Biess, introduction to Histories of the Aftermath, 1; Naumann, “Die Frage nach dem Ende,” 24. 14. Friedrich Arnold, ed., Unser Marienbad: Geschichte und Bedeutung eines Weltkurortes, 1808–1958 (Marburg: Quadriga-Verlag, 1958), 10. 15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Travel Diary from Carlsbad to Rome, 1786; Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Gambler”; Scholem Aleichem, Marienbad; Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad. Mirjam Zadoff surveys the “spa triangle” as a social “magnet” for Central Europe’s Jewry in Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture, trans. William Templer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 16. Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt, 19 (all subsequent citations to this work

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will appear parenthetically in the text). See also Max Reinl, “Franzensbad: Sein Werden und seine berühmtesten Kurgäste aus der deutschen Geiseswelt,” in Das Egerland und seine Bäder: Franzensbad, Karlsbad, Marienbad, ed. Viktor Karell (Frankurt/Main: Verlag das Viergespann, 1966), 215–35. 17. David Rock and Stefan Wolf, eds., Coming Home to Germany? The Integration of Ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe in the Federal Republic (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). 18. Michael Geyer, “Cold War Angst: The Case of West-German Opposition to Rearmament and Nuclear Weapons,” in Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 376–408. 19. Arnold, “‘Kassel 1943 mahnt . . . ,’” 489. 20. George Steinmetz, “Colonial Melancholy and Fordist Nostalgia: The Ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit,” in Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, 294. 21. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, introduction to Ruins of Modernity, 6. 22. See, among others, Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch, “Uncovering Their Stories: The Rubble of Memory and the Bombing War,” in Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 13–19; and Jörg Arnold, The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 23. W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999), 5, 83. 24. Hermann Glaser, “So viel Anfang war nie,” in So viel Anfang war nie: Deutsche Städte, 1945–1949, ed. Hermann Glaser, Lutz von Pufendorf, and Michael Schönreich (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1989), 10. 25. Klaus R. Scherpe, ed., In Deutschland unterwegs: Reportagen, Skizzen, Berichte, 1945–1948 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Verlag, 1982), 273–300. 26. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 86. 27. Valentine Cunningham, “Zerbombte Städte—Die vorzeitigen Ruinen des Zweiten Weltkriegs,” in Ruinenbilder, ed. Aleida Assmann, Monika Gomille, and Gabriele Rippl (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), 121–22. 28. Frank Watson, “The Noise of War, the Silence of the Photograph,” in A Fearsome Heritage: Diverse Legacies of the Cold War, ed. John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2007), 239. 29. Cited in Wilfried Wilms, “Rubble without a Cause: The Air War in Postwar Film,” in German Postwar Films: Life and Love in Ruins, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 30. See also Jörg Friedrich, Brandstätten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs (Berlin: Propyläen, 2003), 239. 30. Brad Prager, “Air War and Allegory,” in Wilms and Rasch, Bombs Away!, 34.

notes to pages 42–50

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31. Hannah Arendt, “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” Commentary 10 (October 1950): 342. 32. Gerd Gemünden, A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 64; Prager, “Air War and Allegory,” 25–26. 33. Molden, “The Cold War,” 212; Lindenberger, “Divided, but Not Disconnected,” 13. 34. See, among others, Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Dierk Walter, eds., Heiße Kriege im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, 2006). 35. Jutta Faehndrich, Eine endliche Geschichte: Die Heimatbücher der deutschen Vertriebenen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2011). 36. Josef Ruff, Carlsbad as It Was and Is: A Guide for Visitors (Carlsbad: O. Maass’ Sons, 1904), 117–27. 37. Viktor Karell, “Karlsbad im Wandel der Zeiten,” in Karell, Das Egerland und seine Bäder, 198. 38. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 15. 39. Anthony Vidler, “Air War and Architecture,” in Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity, 29. 40. Erich Hans, Der Böhmerwald (Stuttgart: Heimatverband der Böhmerwäldler, 1966), 274–88. On Heimatbücher, see Faehndrich, Eine endliche Geschichte; and Demshuk, The Lost German East, 128–42. 41. Arnold, Unser Marienbad, 83–86. 42. Rudi, “Und drüben ist die Heimat . . . : Exklusivbericht für die Leser der ‘Egerer Zeitung,’” EZ 8, no. 9 (May 1957): 120 [hereafter cited as Rudi I]. 43. Hell and Schönle, introduction to Ruins of Modernity, 1, 6. 44. Davide Deriu, “Picturing Ruinscapes: The Areal Photograph as Image of Historical Trauma,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (New York: Wallflower, 2007), 191–92. 45. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2004), 11. 46. Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 52–57. 47. Deriu, “Picturing Ruinscapes,” 199, 196. See also Kay Kirchmann, “Blicke auf Trümmer. Anmerkungen zur fi lmischen Wahrnehmungsorganization der Ruinenlandschaften nach 1945,” in Die zerstörte Stadt: Mediale Repräsentationen urbaner Räume von Troja bis SimCity, ed. Andreas Böhn and Christine Mielke (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007), 273–87. 48. Eric Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble in the Trümmerfi lm,” New German Critique 37, no. 2 110 (2010): 12, 22. 49. Ernst Schremmer, Westböhmen mit Bäderdreieck (Würzburg: Kraft, 1989), 8.

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notes to pages 51–68

50. Bruce Prideaux, “Echoes of War: Battlefield Tourism,” in Battlefi eld Tourism: History, Place, and Interpretation, ed. Chris Ryan (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), 20. 51. Glassheim, “Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia’s Borderlands,” 66, 84. Hitherto unmentioned examples of post–Cold War chronicles of this kind include Anna Duus and Bernhard Dörries, Zerstörte Heimat—das Egerland heute . . . (Dinkelsbühl: Heimatkreis Mies-Pilsen, 2000); and Petr Mikšícˇek, ed., Zmizelé Sudety/Das verschwundene Sudetenland (Domažlice: Antikomplex, 2003). 52. Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble,” 25. 53. Karell, “Karlsbad im Wandel der Zeiten,” 199. 54. Georg Simmel, “Die Ruine: Ein ästhetischer Versuch,” Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, 1901–1908 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 2:129. 55. Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 146. 56. Barndt, “‘Memory Traces of an Abandoned Set of Futures,’” 271. 57. Michel Draguet, “The Treachery of Images: Keys for a Pop Reading of the Work of Magritte,” in Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images, ed. Stephanie Barron and Michel Draguet (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006), 32. 58. Rentschler, “The Place of Rubble,” 10. 59. Kirchmann, “Blicke auf Trümmer,” 279. 60. Simmel, “Die Ruine,” 129. 61. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur, 7. 62. Hilton Als, “Hiroshima, a Film,” in After and Before: Documenting the Bomb (New York: PPP Editions, 2003). 63. Simmel, “Die Ruine,” 126. 64. Ibid., 124. 65. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refl ections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 5. 66. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 295; Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 29.

Chapter Two 1. Adrian von Arburg, “Peripherie oder Pionierland? Konzeptionen zur neuen Funktion des tschechischen Grenzgebiets,” in Grenzgebiet als Forschungsfeld: Aspekte der ethnographischen und kunsthistorischen Erforschung des Grenzlandes (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2009), 91.

notes to pages 70–74

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2. Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 141–46, 159–64; Tom Gunning, “Passion Play as Palimpsest: The Nature of the Text in the History of Early Cinema,” in Une invention du diable?: Cinéma des premiers temps et religion, ed. Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning (Lausanne: Payot, 1992), 102–11. 3. A draft of an unpublished Passion play by the North Bohemian writer Max Erbstein is at Stadtarchiv Waldkraiburg, Heimatkreis Böhmisch-Leipa HaidaDauba 109/001–011. In 1953, Erbstein published a popular adaptation of the fourteenth-century “prophecies of the blind youth of Prague,” widely received as a blueprint for the impending Armageddon (see Max Erbstein, Der blinde Jüngling: Eine böhmische Weissagung aus dem 14. Jahrhundert im Spiegel geschichtlicher Ereignisse [Cologne: Kämmwegverlag, 1953]). 4. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 436–42. 5. Alfred Karasek-Langer, “Neue Formelemente im bayerischen Wallfahrtswesen durch den Zustrom der Heimatvertriebenen,” Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde (1951): 105; Georg R. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust: Ein Beitrag zur religiösen Volkskunde der Gegenwart (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1968), 250–51. See also Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 256–68. 6. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 341–42. 7. Josef Donner, “St. Anna-Wallfahrt Mähring 1981. Predigt beim Festgottesdienst,” HBPW 34, no. 398 (1981): 715. See also Eisch, “‘Doch die Erinnerung, die bleibt mir stets gewiß,’” 44–45. 8. Karl Reiß, “Wallfahrten—Gnadenstätten—Heimattreffen: Kirche und Vertriebene bleiben in enger Verbundenheit,” Volksbote 36, no. 1 (January 1984): 6. 9. E. Sö., “‘. . . und droben steht die Kapelle’: Einweihung der Kapelle ‘Maria Frieden’ am 14. Juli 1963,” EZ 14, no. 16 (August 1963): 255; Josef Schmutzer, St. Anna-Gedächtniskirche am Pfaffenbühl bei Mähring (Geisenfeld: Selbstverlag des Heimatvereines Plan-Weseritz, 1981), 2. 10. Karasek-Langer, “Neue Formelemente,” 104. 11. James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 272. 12. Tony Shaw, “Martyrs, Miracles, and Martians: Religion and Cold War Cinematic Propaganda in the 1950s,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 2 (2002): 7. 13. Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), ix; Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 14. Dianne Kirby, “Religion in the Cold War—An Introduction,” in Religion in the Cold War, ed. Dianne Kirby (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2; Robert A. Ventresca, “The Virgin and the Bear: Religion, Society, and the Cold War in Italy,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 439–56. 15. Monique Scheer, “‘Unter deinen Schutz und Schirm fl iehen wir.’ Religiöse Ausdrucksformen in der Angstkultur des Kalten Krieges,” in Greiner, Mül-

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ler, and Walter, Angst im Kalten Krieg, 326–27; Michael E. O’Sullivan, “West German Miracles: Catholic Mystics, Church Hierarchy, and Postwar Popular Culture,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History Online 6, no. 1 (2009): 1, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/site/40208894/ Default.aspx. 16. Kirby, “Religion in the Cold War,” 1. 17. T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2010), 55–69. 18. Marcia Ann Kupfer, introduction to The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama, ed. Marcia Ann Kupfer (Pennsylvania State University, 2008), 2; Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 14. 19. Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 72. 20. On cross symbolism along the inter-German border, see Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 66–72. 21. O’Sullivan, “West German Miracles,” 1. 22. Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7 (fi rst quotation); Monica Black, “Miracles in the Shadow of the Economic Miracle: The ‘Supernatural 50s’ in West Germany,” Journal of Modern History 84, no. 4 (December 2012): 836 (second quotation). 23. Alfred Bohmann, Das Sudetendeutschtum in Zahlen (Munich: Sudetendeutscher Rat, 1959), 228; Frank Buscher, “The Great Fear: The Catholic Church and the Anticipated Radicalization of Expellees and Refugees in Post-War Germany,” German History 21, no. 2 (2003): 222. 24. Ian Reader, introduction to Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, ed. Ian Reader and Tony Walter (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 2. 25. Thomas A. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 76. 26. David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth- Century Germany (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), xxvii. 27. Black, “Miracles in the Shadow,” 834; Monique Scheer, Rosenkranz und Kriegsvisionen: Marienerscheinungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2006), 29. 28. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 327. 29. Silvia Spitta, Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 98. 30. David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 17. 31. Buscher, “The Great Fear”; Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 331.

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32. O’Sullivan, “West German Miracles,” 1, 6. 33. Tweed, Our Lady of Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 34. Josef Schmutzer, Sankt Anna (Geisenfeld: Heimatverlag Josef Schmuzter, 1968), 21. 35. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 94; Karl Gröger, “Die Prozessions-Madonna von Neumugl,” EZ 35, no. 5 (May 1985), 77; Emil Weber, Die neue Tussetkapelle in Philippsreut, 4th ed. (Hengersberg: Fa. Mühlbauer, n.d.). 36. Ventresca, “The Virgin and the Bear,” 442. 37. Kupfer, introduction to The Passion Story, 9. 38. Elisabeth Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border’: Gender and Rituals of Nationalist Protest in Germany, 1919–1939,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 2 (2000): 211. 39. Berdahl, Where the World Ended, 93–94. 40. Scheer, Rosenkranz und Kriegsvisionen, 30. 41. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 100. 42. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 252. 43. Ibid., 142; “‘Ausgewiesene Muttergottes’ von Mitterfi rmiansreuth,” Glaube und Heimat 3, no. 7 (July 1951): 15. 44. “Die ‘Vertriebenenmadonna’ von Mitterfi rmiansreuth,” Böhmerwäldler Heimatbrief 33, no. 8 (August 1980): 273. 45. The following accounts, unless otherwise noted, stem from Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 141–44. 46. “Die ‘Vertriebenenmadonna’ von Mitterfi rmiansreuth,” 273. 47. Grillinger to Karasek-Langer, 4 December 1950, JKI, SK BrV 314. 48. “Auch die Muttergottes ausgewiesen,” Königsteiner Rufe 2, no. 8 (1950): 252. 49. Grillinger to Karasek-Langer, 25 February 1951, JKI, SK 168cc. 50. Through the end of 1952, “border observations, communications, and rumors” were a regular rubric in BBP’s monthly reports to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior (BayHSta: MInn 80309 II, 23231). 51. Handbuch des Bistums Passau, Stand vom 1. Januar 1958 (Passau: Bischöfl iches Ordinariat Passau, 1958). 52. See, among others, Monique Scheer, “Marienerscheinungen und Kriegserfahrung. Religiöse Deutungsmuster und Kriegserfahrungen deutscher Katholiken 1947–1954,” in KriegsVolksKunde: Zur Erfahrung durch Symbolbildung, ed. Gottfried Korff (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2005), 259–61; and O’Sullivan, “West German Miracles,” 3. 53. Grillinger to Karasek-Langer, 4 December 1950, JKI, SK 168bb. 54. Karasek-Langer, “Neue Formelemente,” 107. 55. See, among others, Eisch “‘Doch die Erinnerung, die bleibt mir stets

262

notes to pages 87–96

gewiß,’” 36; and Kristin Kopp, “Reconfiguring the Border of Fortress Europe in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Lichter,” Germanic Review 82, no. 1 (2007): 37. 56. Blackbourn, Marpingen, 218. 57. Morgan, Visual Piety, 131. 58. Grillinger to Karasek-Langer, 4 December 1950, JKI, SK BrV 314. 59. Philippsreut Curatorium to the Diocese of Passau, 11 July 1951 and 9 July 1952, BZA–P, ABP OA III, Mitterfi rmiansreuth/Freyung 1947–1960 4a), 7189 and 6697. 60. Scheer, “Marienerscheinungen,” 261; Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 113; Marita Krauss, “Die vertriebenen Sudetendeutschen in Bayern nach 1945,” in Sudetengeschichten, ed. Sarah Scholl-Schneider, Miroslav Schneider, and Mateˇj Spurný (Prague: Antikomplex, 2010), 55. 61. Black, “Miracles in the Shadow,” 845. 62. Riemer to Pröbstle, 14 July 1952, BZA–P, ABP OA III, Mitterfi rmiansreuth/Freyung 1947–1960 4a), 6697. 63. Philippsreut Curatorium to the Diocese of Passau, 20 July 1952, BZA–P, ABP OA III, Mitterfi rmiansreuth/Freyung 1947–1960 4a), 7275. 64. BayHSta: MInn 80309 II, 23231; PrLP Az. 412 I, 3893/52, 17 June 1952. See also Fritz Stahler, “Oberfranken und seine Grenzlage,” in Oberfrankens Grenzlandprobleme: Vorträge der Tagung der Gesellschaft für Fränkische Geschichte Juni 1965 in Wunsiedel (Würzburg: F. Schöningh, 1966), 7, 17. 65. Mitterfi rmiansreut Curatorium to the Diocese of Passau, 3 May 1955, BZA–P, ABP OA III, Mitterfi rmiansreut/Freyung 1947–1960 4a), 4658; KarasekLanger, “Neue Formelemente,” 104. 66. BZA–P, ABP OA III, Mitterfi rmiansreuth/Freyung 1947–1960 4a), 4658, 3 May 1955. 67. BayHSta: MInn 80316, II/23231, IX 412 I 500/58, 18 October 1958. 68. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976), 382. 69. Grillinger to Karasek-Langer, 4 December 1950, JKI, SK BrV 314. 70. Freedberg, The Power of Images, 109. 71. “1950 kam die Vertriebenen-Madonna nach Bayern,” Passauer Neue Presse, 15 April 1975. 72. BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982, 7, 411 A 116/51. 73. Scheer, “Marienerscheinungen,” 263. 74. Father E. J. Reichenberger, Sudetendeutsche Passion: Für Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit (Kiel: Arndt, 1995), 38; Emil Gebauer, Sudetendeutsches Golgatha (Kaufbeuren: Isergebirgsverlag, 1946), 64, 50. 75. Waldsassen rectory to the Bishopric of Regensburg, 25 May 1951, BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982, 7, 04350. 76. Hans Haberkorn to Bishop Rudolf Gruber, 22 December 1968, BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982, 7.

notes to pages 96–106

263

77. Kupfer, introduction to The Passion Story, 2. 78. Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 74. 79. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 194–97. Further information on the cult, unless otherwise noted, stems from this source. 80. Ad. Fritsch, “Wies—eine Erinnerung,” EZ 15 (October 1951): n.p. 81. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 142. 82. Anonymous to the Waldsassen rectory, 20 August 1963, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. On invocation of the Middle Ages in the West German reception of the supernatural, see Black, “Miracles in the Shadow,” 841, 848. 83. See Reiß, “Wallfahrten,” 347; and Fritsch, “Wies,” n.p. 84. Herbert Scharf, “Der geschändete Christus von Wies,” Der Egerländer 30, no. 7/8 (July/August 1979): n.p. 85. L.E., “Korpus von Wies in Bayern,” Der Egerländer 4 (1951): 85. 86. “Der ‘Corpus von Wies’ in der Waldsassener Klosterkirche,” Der Egerländer 13, no. 8/9 (August/September 1962): 181. 87. Schroubek to the Waldsassen rectory, 15 November 1964 and 24 March 1965, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. 88. “Geschändeter Christus,” 27 June 1964, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. 89. Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 51. 90. James Marrow, “Inventing the Passion in the Late Middle Ages,” in Kupfer, The Passion Story, 49. 91. Morgan, Visual Piety, 17. 92. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 57, 77. 93. Freedberg, The Power of Images, 120. 94. Leopold Arthofer, “Der Gekreuzigte am Schlagbaum,” Steyrer Zeitung, 21 March 1957, n.p., PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7; reprinted in Wiener Kirchenblatt, 24 March 1957, 1. 95. Emil H. Grünseisen to the Waldsassen rectory, 3 July 1971, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. 96. F. Atzinger to the Waldsassen rectory, 1964, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. 97. Hans Haberkorn to Gruber, 4th Advent Sunday 1968, BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982, 7. 98. Rohrmeier to Gruber, 9 December 1965, 7132, BZA–R, PfaW 9, Kapelle Hatzenreuth 1959–1971. 99. Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border,’” 212. 100. “Eine Kulturschande,” Der Neue Tag, 15 February 1951, n.p., PfaArch– W, GH 20/27.7. 101. Catholic Action of the Waldsassen Parish to Gruber, 24 November 1963, 7134, BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982, 7; Catholic church administration Waldsassen, excerpt from the protocol of meeting on 18 February 1964, 20/24 I, 6; Jo-

264

notes to pages 106–114

sef Steiner and Rohrmeier to Gruber, 31 October 1961, Pfarrer/Kirchenverwaltungsvorstand, 6952. 102. Haberkorn to Gruber, 4th Advent Sunday 1968, BZA–R, PfaW 1946– 1982, 7. 103. Catholic Action of the Waldsassen Parish to Gruber, 24 November 1963, 7134, BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982, 7. 104. Catholic rectory Waldsassen to the Diocesan Office of Finance, 29 September 1971, BZA–R, PfaW 9, Kapelle Hatzenreuth 1959–1971. 105. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 32; Groebner, Defaced, 88. 106. Ida Nüssel, “Der Frevel von Wies,” EZ 50, no. 1 (January 1999): 11. 107. Steiner and Rohrmeier to Gruber, 31 October 1961, BZA–R, PfaW 6952. 108. Freedberg, The Power of Images, 110. 109. Georg Simmel, “Der Bilderrahmen: Ein ästhetischer Versuch,” in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 1:101–2. 110. Arthofer, “Der Gekreuzigte.” 111. Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990), 12. 112. Arthofer, “Der Gekreuzigte.” 113. Robert Treml, “Aus der Geschichte der Wallfahrtsstätte ‘zum gegeißelten Heiland’ und des geschändeten Christus ‘va da Wies’” (2001), 2, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. 114. Karasek-Langer, “Neue Formelemente,” 107. 115. Groebner, Defaced, 95. 116. Treml, “Aus der Geschichte,” 1. 117. Morgan, Visual Piety, 124, 131. 118. Nissan N. Perez, “Who Do You Say I Am?,” in Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography (London, Merrell, 2003), 25. 119. Untitled, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7; “Eine Kunstschande” and “ChristusKorpus,” BZA–R, PfaW 1946–1982. 120. Groebner, Defaced, 88. 121. Henk van Os et al., The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300–1500 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 106–14. 122. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel, 8. 123. Freedberg, The Power of Images, 126. 124. Marrow, “Inventing the Passion,” 50. 125. Steiner to Rohrmeier, 18 June 1962, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7b. 126. Johann Peschek to the Waldsassen rectory, 2 October 1962, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7c. 127. E. Nüttgens to the Waldsassen rectory, 9 January 1959, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7.

notes to pages 114–123

265

128. Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 71. 129. Wilhelm Bauer to the Waldsassen rectory, 21 August 1962, PfaArch–W, GH 20/27.7. 130. Morgan, Visual Piety, 3. 131. Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998), 13. 132. Perez, “Who Do You Say I Am?,” 14. 133. Schwain, Signs of Grace, 76–77; Perez, “Who Do You Say I Am?,” 83. 134. Schwain, Signs of Grace, 80. 135. Freedberg, The Power of Images, 121. 136. Schwain, Signs of Grace, 78, 96; David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 106. 137. Schwain, Signs of Grace, 83. 138. Ibid., 82. 139. Belting, The Image and Its Public, 52–54. 140. Nüssel, “Der Frevel von Wies,” 11. 141. Groebner, Defaced, 108. 142. Kupfer, introduction to The Passion Story, 10. 143. Morgan, Visual Piety, 9. 144. Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling, 158. 145. Rohrmeier to Archbishop Martin Buchberger, 1 December 1959, BZA–R, PfaW 9, Kapelle Hatzenreuth 1959–1971, 7495. See also Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 70. 146. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 6. 147. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1. 148. Kirby, “Religion in the Cold War,” 2. 149. Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 115–28, 141; Freedberg, The Power of Images, 378–428. 150. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 77. 151. Richard H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7. 152. Ibid., 11. 153. Gamboni, The Destruction of Art, 87, 89. 154. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 331, 342; Brenda Melendy, “Private and Public, Personal and Political: Exploring German Expellee Memory Tourism,” World History Review 1, no. 1 (2003): 44.

266

notes to pages 126–129

Chapter Three 1. Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border,’” 214. 2. See Köstlin, “Grenzland-Tourismus,” 41–51; Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 146–70; and Haller, “Wald Heil!,” 169–74, 265–86. 3. Karlheinz Wöhler, “Endlich wieder urlauben: Urlaub in den fünfziger Jahren als ein Phänomen der Moderne,” in Die Kultur der fünfziger Jahre, ed. Werner Faulstich (Padeborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002), 263–75. 4. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 19. 5. Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 81, 84. 6. Tampke, Czech–German Relations, 140; Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 122–23. 7. Paul P. Bernard, Rush to the Alps: The Evolution of Vacationing to Switzerland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 3. 8. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 3. 9. Dr. H., “‘Heimat, wie war ich Dir nah’ . . . ,” EZ 10, no. 2 (February 1959): 17 [hereafter cited as Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” II]. 10. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries in the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg: Geschichte eines Radikalen Zeitalters, 1947–1991 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), 20. Further reflections on this topic appear in Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, eds., Uncertain Empire. 11. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travel Writing between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 214. 12. E. Sö., “Gedanken am Schlagbaum,” EZ 13, no. 15 (August 1962): 212 (fi rst quotation); Oskar Rohrbach, “Auf Grenzfahrt,” Glaube und Heimat 9, no. 1 (January 1961): 7 (second quotation). 13. Trautl Irgang, “Grenzlandfahrt 1981,” EZ 32, no. 10 (October 1981): 148 (quotation); Emil Reimer, “Das Leben an der Grenze,” HbPW 17, no. 207 (November 1965): 10. 14. Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, “Memorialization of the German– German Border in the Context of Constructions of Heimat,” in Memorialization in Germany since 1945, ed. Bill Niven and Chloe Paver (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 320. 15. Katharina Rex and Theobald Klee, “Grenze durch Deutschlands Herz: Am Todesstreifen entlang von Helmstedt nach Friedland,” Grenzland: Illustrierte Zeitschrift der Vertriebenen 2, no. 14 (1952): 7. 16. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 7; Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 83.

notes to pages 130–134

267

17. Adalbert Stifter, “Der Hochwald,” in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt/ Main: Insel Verlag, 1959), 1:304. 18. On the double exposure in Stifter, see Eric Downing, Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 41–90. 19. Sepp Skalitzky, “Die alte Wiege,” in Dornenkrone der Heimat (Buxheim/ Allgäu: Martin Verlag, 1961), 75–77. 20. Walter Benjamin, “Stifter,” in vol. 2, pt. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 609. 21. Praxl, Adalbert Stifter, 17–19; Pranghofer, Böhmerwaldmuseum Passau, 54. 22. Hannah Arendt, “Great Friend of Reality: Adalbert Stifter,” in Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 111. 23. Oskar Steinheil, ed., Ostbayern, Fichtelgebirge, Oberpfalz, Bayerischer Wald, Niederbayern (Stuttgart: Baedekers Autoführer-Verlag, 1953), 75, 81, 90. 24. Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald, 236. 25. Fritz Huemer-Kreiner, “Kennst du deine Heimat?,” Böhmerwäldler Heimatbrief 78, no. 2 (February 1955): 266. 26. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 4. 27. Hayden White, “The Narrativization of Real Events,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 795. 28. Eisch, Grenze, 130. 29. R. Wollmann, “Schule und Wiedervereinigung. Beiträge zur Unterrichtspraxis,” Sudetendeutscher Erzieherbrief 6, no. 3 (1959): 13–15; Alfred Camman, “Von Bremen an die böhmische Grenze. Studienfahrt einer Oberprima,” Deutsche Ostkunde. West-ostdeutsche Blätter für Erziehung und Unterricht 10, no. 2 (1964): 27–28. An overview of Ostkunde appears in Rolf Meinhardt, Deutsche Ostkunde: Ein Beitrag zur Pädagogik des Kalten Krieges, 1945–1968 (Oldenburg: MI Verlag, 1978). 30. “Sudetendeutsche Jugend betreut Grenzlandfahrt,” Bischofsteinitzer Heimatbrief, 18 July 1986, 4. 31. Carol Traynor Williams, introduction to Travel Culture: Essays on What Makes Us Go (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), xiv. 32. Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border,’” 216–19. 33. Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 12. 34. Wendy Bracewell, “Adventures in the Marketplace: Yugoslav Travel Writing and Tourism in the 1950s–1960s,” in Turizm: The Russian and East Euro-

268

notes to pages 134–138

pean Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism, ed. Anne E. Gorsuch and Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 254. 35. Tim Youngs, “Introduction: Filling the Blank Spaces,” in Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century: Filling the Blank Space, ed. Tim Youngs (London: Anthem Press, 2006), 2. 36. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), vii; Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2011), 8, 11. 37. Rudolf Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” EZ 39, no. 11 (November 1988): 210. 38. William Sherman, “Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720),” in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30–32; Judith Adler, “Origins of Sightseeing,” in Williams, Travel Culture, 9–16. 39. Fussell, Abroad, 208–10. 40. Thompson, Travel Writing, 114. 41. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5–12. 42. See, among others, Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 6; and Pertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 43. Fussell, Abroad, 203. 44. K. Pötzl, “Grenzen und Grenzgänger,” EZ 41, no. 2 (February 1990): 26; Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” 210. 45. Introduction to Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage des Bayerischen und Böhmerwaldes nach dem 2. Weltkrieg. Bericht der Landesplanungsstelle im Bayerischen Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft (Munich, 1949). 46. Lester B. Rowntree, “The Cultural Landscape Concept in American Human Geography,” in Concepts in Human Geography, ed. Carville Earle, Kent Mathewson, and Martin S. Kenzer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 127–34; Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 1–2. These ideas were adopted by Carl O. Sauer in his seminal essay, “The Morphology of Landscape” (1925), to make the same argument about North America’s geography. 47. Josef Bürger, Unser Böhmerwald: Land und Leute einst und heute (Passau: Verlag des Böhmerwaldmuseums, 1963), 37. 48. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 27. 49. Harvey, “Pilgrimages to the ‘Bleeding Border,’” 219. 50. Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald, 226. 51. Introduction to Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage des Bayerischen und Böhmerwaldes nach dem 2. Weltkrieg, n.p. 52. “Förderung des Fremdenverkehrs,” in Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage des Bayerischen und Böhmerwaldes, 18.

notes to pages 138–143

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53. Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald, 1. 54. Bayerischer Wald: Berge—Wälder—Seen zwischen Regensburg und Passau. Since 1978, this work has been reprinted in German, English, French, and Dutch. 55. Judson, Guardians of the Nation, 150. 56. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 7–9. 57. Ibid., 22. 58. Melendy, In Search of Heimat, 51. See also Peter Becher, “Unser sudetendeutscher Klassiker . . . Aspekte der deutschböhmischen Stifterrezeption 1918–1938,” in Adalbert Stifter: Studien zu seiner Rezeption und Wirkung II: 1931–1988, ed. Johann Lachinger (Linz: Adalbert-Stifter-Institut des Landes Oberöstrreich, 1995), 84–96. 59. Emanuel Schmid, “Viele Wege führen in die Ewigkeit. Adalbert Stifters Einzug in die Walhalla,” in Adalbert Stifter: Dichter und Maler, Denkmalpfleger und Schulmann. Neue Zugänge zu seinem Werk, ed. Hartmut Laufhütte und Karl Möseneder (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996), 545. 60. Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund, Führer durch den Böhmerwald (österreichische und bairische Anteile) und das deutsche Südböhmen (Budweis: L. E. Hansen, 1888). 61. BayHSta: MInn 80308–80318. 62. BayHSta: MInn 80315, 23231, VIII, 412 I 500/58, 18 October 1958. 63. BayHSta: MInn 80308–80318; PrGP, 412 I, 5591/52, 22 August 1952 and 412 I, 7179/52, 15 October 1952. The Czech records are highlighted in Katerˇina Lozoviuková, “Grenzüberschreitungen und Sanktion: Die Wahrnehmung der Grenze in den tschechischen Gerichtsakten,” in Grenzgebiet als Forschungsfeld, 113–20. 64. Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 47; Gorsuch and Koenker, introduction to Turizm, 6. 65. Examples include BayHSta: MInn 80308, I, 23231, 412 I, 5512/51, 10 August 1951; MInn 80313, 23231, 412 I 500/57, 16 September 1957; and MInn 80318 XI, 23231, 2323/40, VS NfD 464/59, 20 May 1959. 66. St., “Heuss blickt über den eisernen Vorhang,” Volksbote 4, no. 33 (September 1954): 4. 67. BayHSta: MInn 80309 II, 23231, 412 I, 4675/52, 22 July 1952. 68. “Förderung des Fremdenverkehrs,” in Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage des Bayerischen und Böhmerwaldes, 19. 69. Stefanie Roehling, Die Reisewelle der Fünfziger Jahre—Der Beginn des Massentourismus. Eine Betrachtung der Entwicklungen nach dem Ende des II. Weltkrieges bis zur ersten wirtschaftlichen Rezession 1966/67 (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2007), 5. 70. Wolfgang Queck, “Ferien- und Erholungsland,” Bayerischer und Ober-

270

notes to pages 143–148

pfälzer Wald: Land an der Grenze, ed. Georg Priehäusser (Essen: BurghardVerlag Ernst Heyer, 1965), 305–6. 71. BayHSta: MInn 80309, II, 23231, 412 I, 6400/52 E, 23 September 1952; MInn 80310, III, 23231, 412 I, 8/54, 22 November 1954. 72. BayHSta: MInn 80313, VI, 23231, 412 I 500/57, 16 September 1957. 73. BayHSta: MInn 80318, XI, 23231, 2323/40, VS NfD 464/59, 20 August 1959; MInn 80315, VIII, 23231, 412 I 500/58, 20 June 1958. 74. BayHSta: MInn 80309, II, 23231, 412 I, 6400/52 E, 23 September 1952; MInn 80311, 412 I 511/55, 23 May 1956. 75. BayHSta: MInn 80311, 412 I 511/55, 21 August 1956; MInn 80311, 412 I 511/55, 24 September 1956; Minn 80311 412 I 511/55, 19 July 1956. 76. Richard H. Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”: Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2010), 135–60. 77. BayHSta: MInn 80310, III, 23231, 412 I, 8/54, 16 July 1954; MInn 80311, 412 I 5/54, 18 January 1955. 78. BayHSta: MInn 80308, I, 23231, 412 I, 7089/51, 10 October 1951. 79. “Auf Spähtrupp in der Todeszone,” Grenzland: Illustrierte Zeitschrift der Vertriebenen 1, no. 12 (1951): 7. 80. See Elisabeth Bronfen, “Die schöne Leiche: Weiblicher Tod als motivische Konstante von der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis in die Moderne,” in Weiblichkeit und Tod in der Literatur, ed. Inge Stephan und Renate Berger (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 1987), 87–115; and Andreas Bernhard, “Der deutsche Wald in Malerei und Grafi k,” in Breymayer and Ulrich, Unter Bäumen, 142. 81. See Komska, “Theater at the Iron Curtain,” German Studies Review 37:1 (Winter 2014): 87–108. 82. Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald, 227–28. 83. BayHSta: MInn 80313, VI, 23231, 412 I 500/57, 16 May 1957. 84. BayHSta: MInn 80308, I, 23231, 412 I, 5512/51, 10 August 1951; MInn 80312, 412 I 511/56, 14 March 1957. 85. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 3. 86. Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald, 242; Queck, “Ferien- und Erholungsland,” 301. 87. “Wir machten eine Grenzlandfahrt, verbunden mit einem Besuch der Egerquelle,” Gmoi-Berichte der Egerländer 11, no. 12 (December 1960): 59; Erich Hans, Der Böhmerwald, 272. 88. Postcard from Hans Watzlik to Sepp Skalitzky, 8 June 1947, StArchPa/ ArchBö–NSka. 89. Postcard from Franz Seidl to Maria Skalitzky, 19 June 1976, StArchPa/ ArchBö–NSka. 90. See “Der Arber hängt im Netz,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21 August 1957, “Tauziehen um den Arber auf dem Höhepunkt,” Passauer Neue Presse, 30 April

notes to pages 149–154

271

1957, and “Arber-Zwischenspiel,” Deggendorfer Zeitung, 1 May, 1957, all in BayHSta: StK 21046. 91. BayHSta: MInn 80311, 412 I 511/55, 18 August 1955; MInn 80311, 412 I 511/55, 24 September 1956. 92. kam, “Gedanken zur Öffnung der tschechoslowakischen Grenze,” EZ 15, no. 4 (February 1964): 58–59. 93. kam, “Gedanken,” 58; Thomas Südbeck, “Motorisierung, Verkehrsentwicklung und Verkehrspolitik in Westdeutschland in den 50er Jahren,” in Modernisierung im Wiederaufbau: Die westdeutsche Gesellschaft der 50er Jahre, ed. Alex Schildt and Arnold Sywottek (Bonn: J. H. W. Dietz, 1993), 170–87. 94. “Grenzlandfahrt: Bericht für jene Heimatvertriebenen, denen eine solche Begegnung nicht möglich ist,” EZ 11, no. 10 (May 1960): 144. 95. Rudy Koshar, “Germans at the Wheel: Cars and Leisure Travel in Interwar Germany,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (New York: Berg, 2002), 217. 96. BayHSta: MInn 80311, 412 I 511/55, 24 September 1956. 97. Tu., “Mähring 1982—Betrachtungen von einst und jetzt,” HbPW 34, no. 412 (December 1982): 666; Rohrbach, “Auf Grenzfahrt,” 6; “In drei Personenwagen und 25 Autobussen fuhren über tausend Angehörige der AckermannGemeinde und der ‘Jungen Aktion,’” Volksbote 7, no. 33 (September 1955): 1. 98. “Grenzlandfahrt: Bericht für jene Heimatvertriebenen,” 144. 99. Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” 209. 100. Pötzl, “Grenzen und Grenzgänger,” 26–27. 101. HBaySta: MInn 80317, 23231, 412 I 500/58, 21 August 1958. 102. Reiß, “Wallfahrten,” 6; Die Eingliederung der Heimatvertriebenen im Landkreis Cham: Eine Dokumentation des Landkreises Cham (Furth im Wald: Perlinger Druck, 1988). 103. Cosgrove and della Dora, High Places, 4. 104. Stifter, “Der Hochwald,” 207. 105. Jungbauer, Böhmerwald-Sagen, 90–91. 106. Grueber and Müller, Der bayrische Wald, 157. 107. “Die Sage von Dreisesselberg,” Volksbote 4, no. 22 (May 1952): 5. 108. BayHSta: MInn 80309, II, 23231, 412 I, 3893/52, 17 June 1952. 109. gkm, “Dreisessel—Schnittpunkt dreier Länder,” Volksbote 4, no. 1 (January 1952): 7. 110. BayHSta: MInn 80309, II, 23231, 412 I, 5591/52, 22 August 1952; MInn 80310, III, 23231, 412 I, 8/54, 15 October 1954. 111. Sieghardt, Bayerischer Wald, 231. 112. Ibid., 232. 113. Ibid., 229, 226. 114. Ernst Freimut, Der Tillenberg: Ein Sagenschatz aus dem Egerlande (Vienna : K. u. k. Hofdruckerei, 1904), 198.

272

notes to pages 156–164

115. Grueber and Müller, Der bayrische Wald, 246. 116. Freimut, Der Tillenberg, 208. 117. “Sagenwandern am Tillenberg,” EZ 40, no. 5 (May 1989): 94. 118. Johann A. Blaha, “Eger: Tillenbergwanderung,” in Heimkehr: Gedichte und Prosastücke (Altötting: Gebrüder Geiselberger, 1966), 144. 119. Joseph Brodsky, “The Sound of the Tide,” in Less Than One (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 164. 120. jv, “Wo ist der Mittelpunkt Europas?,” EZ 32, no. 11 (November 1981): 166. 121. Magdalena Marszałek, “On Slavs and Germans: Andrzej Stasiuk’s Geopoetics of Central European Memory,” in Re-mapping Polish-German Historical Memory: Physical, Political, and Literary Spaces since World War II, ed. Justyna Beinek and Piotr H. Kosicki (Bloomington: Slavica, 2011), 187, 189. See also Stanisław Mucha’s fi lm The Center (Die Mitte, 2004). 122. H.S., “Grenzwanderung um den Tilln-Berg,” EZ 36, no. 6 (June 1985): 96. 123. “Feier am Mittelpunkt Europas,” EZ 36, no. 12 (December 1985): 220. 124. Marszałek, “On Slavs and Germans,” 186. 125. Festschrift zur Patenschaftsübernahme der Marktgemeinde Neualbenreuth über die ehemalige Gemeinde Maiersgrün und Grafengrün (Waldsassen: Wittmann-Druck, 1980), 22–23, 29. 126. jv, “Wo ist der Mittelpunkt Europas?,” 166. 127. bf, “Was es mit dem Mittelpunkt Europeas auf sich hat,” EZ 46, no. 11 (November 1995): 230. 128. BayHSta: MInn 80308, I, 23231, 412 I, 1621/51, March 1951. 129. Dr. H., “Heimat, wie war ich Dir nah’ . . . ,” EZ 10, no. 7 (January 1959): 6 [hereafter cited as Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” I]. 130. Walter Becher, “Meine lieben Mitbürger and Landsleute,” HbPW 34, no. 410 (October 1982): 543. 131. “Grenzwanderung um den Tillenberg,” EZ 37, no. 11 (November 1986): 215. 132. jv, “Wo ist der Mittelpunkt Europas?,” 166. 133. “Feier am Mittelpunkt Europas,” 220. 134. bf, “Was es mit dem Mittelpunkt Europeas auf sich hat,” 231. 135. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 23; Eisch, Grenze, 106. 136. “An der Heimatgrenze,” HbPW 2, no. 3 (October 1950): 136–37. 137. kam, “Gedanken,” 58. 138. Judith Adler, “Origins of Sightseeing,” 9. 139. Gorsuch and Koenker, introduction to Turizm, 1. 140. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 10. 141. See Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” I, 5; and Trautl Irgang, “Grenzlandfahrt 1985,” EZ 36, no. 10 (October 1985): 170. 142. F.R., “Am ‘Eisernen Vorhang’ entlang,” HbPW 5, no. 53 (January 1953):

notes to pages 164–174

273

205. All subsequent explanation and quotations from this text refer to pages 205–8. 143. Cummings, Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom,” 65–67; BayHSta: GrPo 422, 1375–1379. 144. Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, 37. 145. Gorsuch and Koenker, introduction to Turizm, 6. 146. See my “Heimat without Qualities: Sprachkritik in the ‘Miracle Years,’” German Politics and Society 29, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 47–67. 147. Postcard from Erich and Heidi Hans to Maria Skalitzky, 9 August 1972, StArchPa/ArchBö–NSka. 148. Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic,” Germanic Review 80, no. 1 (2005): 84. 149. W. Moelle, “Das Signal steht auf Halt: Mit dem Bundesgrenzschutz am ‘Eisernen Vorhang,’” SdZ, 21 June 1963, 9. 150. Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” 142, 141. 151. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 152. Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” II, 18; W. v. Lutzau, “Grenzlandfahrt der Gmoi Erding,” Der Egerländer 12, no. 1 (January 1961): 12. 153. Bernd Greiner, “Angst im Kalten Krieg: Bilanz und Ausblick,” in Greiner, Müller, and Walter, Angst im Kalten Krieg, 19. 154. Rudi, “Und drüben ist die Heimat . . . : Exklusivbericht für die Leser der ‘Egerer Zeitung,’” EZ 8, no. 9 (May 1957): 120 [herafter cited as Rudi I]. 155. Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” II, 18. 156. Greiner, “Angst im Kalten Krieg: Bilanz und Ausblick,” 19, 22, 14. 157. Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” I, 6. 158. Rohrbach, “Auf Grenzfahrt,” 7; Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” 209; Irgang, “Grenzlandfahrt 1985,” 170. 159. Rudi I, 121; Rudi, “Und drüben ist die Heimat . . . : Exklusivbericht für die Leser der ‘Egerer Zeitung,’” EZ 8, no. 9 (May 1957): 131 [hereafter cited as Rudi II]. On the dash, see Paul Crumbley, Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 22. 160. Rohrbach, “Auf Grenzfahrt,” 7; Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” 209, respectively. 161. Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” 209. 162. Andreas Härter, Digressionen: Studien zum Verhältnis und Abweichung in Rhetorik und Poetik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 8–10; J. J. Long, “‘Perfume from a Dress’: On Not Getting to the Point,” in Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, ed. Rhian Atkin (London: Legenda, 2011), 5. 163. Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 12.

274

notes to pages 174–180

164. Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1961), 19:235. 165. Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 21:153. 166. “Grenzlandfahrt: Bericht für jene Heimatvertriebenen,” 144; “Grenzlandfahrt einer Eghalanda Gmoi,” Der Egerländer 15, no. 11 (November 1964): 310; Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 22. 167. Sepp Skalitzky, “Entseeltes, heimatliches Land: Eine Fahrt an die Grenze,” SdZ, 3 September 1955, 5. 168. Rudi I, 120. 169. Prideaux, “Echoes of War,” 17. 170. Rudi II, 131; W. Schubert, “Ein Blick nach drüben,” Falkenauer Heimatbrief 1, no. 14 (January 1962): 2. 171. Rudi I, 121. 172. Ibid. 173. Schubert, “Ein Blick nach drüben,” 2. 174. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86. 175. Thompson, Travel Writing, 9, 119, 133; Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, 40–41. 176. Thompson, Travel Writing, 5. 177. E. Sö., “Gedanken am Schlagbaum,” 211. 178. Berdahl, Where the World Ended, 149; Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 78. See also Eckert, “Greetings from the Zonal Border,” 27. 179. Molden, “The Cold War,” 216–17. 180. Lindenberger, “Divided, but Not Disconnected,” 15. 181. Zygmunt Baumann, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 96. 182. Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 8. 183. Moranda, “East German Tourist Itineraries: In Search of a Common Destination,” in Gorsuch and Koenker, Turizm, 266, 268.

Chapter Four 1. R. Adolph, “Abschied von Emma Stifter. Die Großnichte Adalbert Stifters heimatvertrieben in Bayern verstorben,” Volksbote 3, no. 60 (November 1951): 7. 2. See, especially, his “Lebensfragen unserer Dichtung” (Der Sudetendeutsche, 15 July 1950, 4), considered in Komska, “Heimat without Qualities.” 3. Langford and Langford, A Cold War Tourist, 4. 4. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 8.

notes to pages 180–185

275

5. Demshuk, The Lost German East, 14–15. 6. John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography, and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 12. 7. Hal Foster, preface to Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), ix. 8. Pieter De Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8. 9. This bifurcation demonstrates that vision in the borderlands was not limited to imagination, as suggested in Eisch, “‘Doch die Erinnerung, die bleibt mir stets gewiß,’” 30. 10. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 284. 11. Adolf Böhm, “Erinnerung an Mähring,” HbPW 5, no. 61 (September 1953): 1. 12. Annie Götz-Kollmer, “An der Grenze,” EZ 37, no. 3 (March 1986): 37. 13. “Die Sudetendeutschen bleiben an der Grenze,” Volksbote 4, no. 37 (October 1954): 6. 14. Skalitzky, “Entseeltes, heimatliches Land,” 5. 15. Willi Junker, “Die Mähringer Feiertage 1966,” HbPW 18, no. 217 (September 1966): 708; Hanni Zörkendörfer, “Sehnsucht nach der Heimat,” Marienbader Heimatbrief 22 (July 1950): 7–8. 16. Wilhelm Wolf, “Blick über unsere Heimatgrenze bei Mähring,” HbPW 5, no. 51 (November 1952): 78. 17. Anton Löschner, “Ewig liebe Heimat (Ein Rundblick),” MarienbadTepler Heimatbrief 32 (May 1951): 9. On the importance of elevation for Cold War travelers, see Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 11. 18. Demshuk, The Lost German East, 178–80. 19. “Bekenntnis zur angestammten Heimat: 25 Jahre Grenzlandturm: Andacht der Egerländer,” EZ 38, no. 7 (July 1987): 121. See also 700 Jahre Neualbenreuth und 25 Jahre Grenzlandturm: Festchronik, 2nd ed. (Neualbenreuth: Verlag Markt Neualbenreuth, 1998), 9 (the fi rst edition appeared in 1987). 20. “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 10, no. 9 (May 1959): 123. 21. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 86–87. 22. De Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 2. 23. Guest book entry, Bruder-Klaus-Kapelle (Hatzenreuth), 24 July 1982. I also consulted visitor books from the following chapels: Tusset Kapelle (Philippsreut), St. Mary of Peace (Neualbenreuth), and St. Anna (Mähring). 24. Ullrich, Geteilte Ansichten, 103. 25. Peter Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Alon Confi no and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2002), 64.

276

notes to pages 186–191

26. Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 14, no. 54 (June 1966): 89. 27. “Festgottendienst am Pfaffenbühl,” HbPW 35, no. 422 (October 1983): 506. 28. “Niemandsland im Herzen Europas. Ein Blick über die Böhmerwaldgrenze in die entseelte Heimat—Stacheldrahtverhaue, Minenfelder und Bunker . . . ,” Der Sudetendeutsche, 12 April 1952, 3. 29. “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 10, no. 9 (May 1959): 123. 30. “Unser Sudetenland,” Der Sudetendeutsche, 20 August 1949, 12. 31. Löschner, “Ewig liebe Heimat,” 9. 32. “Geleitwort zum Heimattreffen 1953 in Mähring,” HbPW 5, no. 59 (July 1953): 469. 33. “Festgottesdienst am Pfaffenbühl,” HbPW 35, no. 422 (October 1983): 507. 34. Josef Weitzer, “Heimat-Sehnen,” Der Egerländer 15, no. 12 (December 1964): 331. 35. Yuri Lotman, Analysis of the Poetic Text, trans. D. Barton Johnson (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1976), 58. 36. Herbert Spitz, “Wirklichkeit oder Illusion der Heimkehr? Beitrag eines jungen Sudetendeutschen mit Sinn für die Realität der Gegenwart,” Der Sudetendeutsche, 6 February 1954, 2. 37. Rudi Marterer, “Der Blick nach drüben,” Jahrbuch der Egerländer (1964): 88. 38. Margarete Kubelka, “An der böhmischen Grenze,” Sudetenland 5, no. 4 (1963): 257; Ludwig Adler, “An der Grenze,” Böhmerwäldler Jahrbuch (1980): 61. 39. F.R., “Am ‘Eisernen Vorhang’ entlang,” 205. 40. R.H., “Der Sudetendeutsche: seine Aufgabe und sein Ziel. Nur eine unabhängige und überparteiliche Zeitung kann heute im Ausland wirken,” Der Sudetendeutsche, 5 June 1954, 7. 41. Walter Becher, “Das Sudetenland—eine pädagogische Provinz europäischen Ranges und deren Ausstrahlung in die Gegenwart,” Sudetendeutscher Erzieherbrief 40, no. 1 (1993): 17. 42. Peter Becher, Adalbert Stifter: Sehnsucht nach Harmonie (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2005), 224. 43. Fritz Huemer-Kreiner, “Adalbert Stifter und Böhmen,” Böhmerwäldler Heimatbrief 79, no. 3 (March 1955): 301. 44. Becher, “Unser sudetendeutscher Klassiker . . . ,” 84–96. 45. Stifter, untitled poem, Marienbad-Tepler Heimatbrief 8 (November 1955): 203. The poem does not appear in Stifter’s Gesammelte Werke (Insel Verlag), but for my purposes its authorship is less important than the fact that it was attributed to Stifter.

notes to pages 191–205

277

46. Franz Lorenz, “Blick vom Großen Osser,” Volksbote 4, no. 1 (January 1952): 7. All subsequent references in the text to this poem refer to this page. 47. Johann Balej, “Erlebnis an der Grenze: Eine Begebenheit, die sich hier im Bayerischen Wald zugetragen hat,” Böhmerwäldler Heimatbrief 2, no. 2 (February 1948): 11. 48. Alfred Doppler, “Das sanfte Gesetz und die unsafte Natur in Stifters Erzählungen,” in Geborgenheit und Gefährdung in der epischen und malerischen Welt Adalbert Stifters, ed. Jattie Enklaar and Hans Ester (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2006), 13–22. 49. Anton Blaha, “Blick ins Heimatland,” EZ 10, no. 15 (August 1959): 207. 50. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2000), 201–5. Contrasting patterns are described in Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 13. 51. Reproduced in Der Egerländer 1 (1951): 62. 52. See Drawing the Iron Curtain: Cold War Cartoons, 1946–1960 (Washington, DC: The Library, 1996). 53. Gudrun Ensslin and Bernward Vesper, Gegen den Tod: Stimmen deutscher Schriftsteller gegen die Atombombe (Berlin: P. Busch, 1964). See also Walter Jens, ed., Leben im Atomzeitalter: Schriftsteller und Dichter zum Thema unserer Zeit (Gräfelfi ng: Moos, 1987); and Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 183–240. 54. Henning Süssner, “Still Yearning for the Lost Heimat? Ethnic German Expellees and the Politics of Belonging,” German Politics and Society 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 8. 55. Chris Rojek and John Urry, Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997), 179. 56. BaySta–A, GrPoI–FiW–F, 3–5, 14, 16, 93, 107. 57. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 9–10; Rojek and Urry, Touring Cultures, 185. 58. Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt, 61. 59. John Lyons, Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 2:637. 60. Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990), 94. 61. Ibid., 94, 111. 62. Ibid., 111. 63. Ibid., 141. 64. Johannes Hofer, “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688,” trans. Carolyn Kiser Anspach, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2, no. 1 (March 1934): 380. Subsequent quotations from this work are cited parenthetically in the text.

278

notes to pages 205–209

65. Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 194. 66. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xviii. 67. Klaus Brunnert, Nostalgie in der Geschichte der Medizin (Düsseldorf: Triltsch Verlag, 1984), 4; Kimberly Smith, “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 506; Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xvii (quotation). 68. Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” 198. 69. Elisabeth Bronfen, “Fatale Widersprüche,” in Heimweh und Verbrechen, by Karl Jaspers (Munich: Belleville, 1996), 12. 70. Ute Brandes and Bernd Busch, “Die Zukuft der Sinne: Sehsucht. Einstiege im Dialog,” in Sehsucht: Über die Veränderung in der visuellen Wahrnehmung, ed. Ute Brandes (Göttingen: Steidl, 1995), 15. 71. kam, “Gedanken,” 58. 72. Künl, “Zum St. Anna-Tag,” 59. 73. Löschner, “Ewig liebe Heimat,” 9; Karl Weber, “Ein Fernblick über die Grenze,” Mareinbad-Tepler Heimatbrief 37 (October 1951): 10. 74. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 283; Maria Kluhs, “Dank an Neualbenreuth,” EZ 30, no. 5 (May 1979): 64. 75. Herbert Wessely, “Blick über die Grenze,” in Jahrbuch der Egerländer (1957): 30. 76. Schauwecker was the leading ideologue behind the rebirth of the Nordgau, a medieval territory between the Danube in the Upper Palatinate/ Franconia and the Bavarian Forest (Egerländer Biographisches Lexikon mit ausgewählten Persönlichkeiten aus dem ehemaligen Reg.-Bez. Eger, ed. Dr. Josef Weinmann [Druckhaus Bayreuth, 1985], 138). Unless otherwise indicated, the biographies of the authors discussed in this chapter stem from the Lexikon as well. 77. kam, “Gedanken,” 58. 78. K. Reger, “Die Abschlußfeier der Eghalanda Gmoin am Heimatturm Neualbenreuth,” Der Egerländer 13, no. 10 (October 1962): 230–31. 79. Heinz Schauwecker, “Am Heimatturm von Neualbenreuth/Die Oberpfalz an die Egerländer,” Der Egerländer 13, no. 10 (October 1962): 231. 80. Schauwecker, “Die Grenze,” Jahrbuch der Egerländer (1959): 90; “An der Grenze!,” Der Egerländer 10, no. 5/6 (May/June 1959): 79. 81. Schauwecker, “Die Grenze,” 90. 82. Schroubek, Wallfahrt und Heimatverlust, 283. 83. Zörkendörfer, “Sehnsucht nach der Heimat,” 7. 84. Betty Künl, “Zum St. Anna-Tag,” in 500 Jahre Stadt Weseritz, 25. und 26. Juli 1959 in Tirschenreuth. Festschrift zum 7. Heimattreffen und Wall-

notes to pages 210–215

279

fahrt Heimatkreis Plan-Weseritz (Geisenfeld: Heimatverlag Josef Schmutzer, 1959), 59. 85. Huemer-Kreiner, “Kennst du deine Heimat?,” 266. 86. Examples include “Unser Turm,” Altvater 3/4 (January/February 1953), 6–7; Otfried Michl, “Zum Turm der Heimat in Neualbenreuth,” EZ 12, no. 13 (July 1961): 193; “Die Habsburg-Warte auf dem Altvater,” SdZ, 30 January 1987, 7; and Bartl, Egerland einst und jetzt, 68–69. After 1989, Sudeten Germans continued to sponsor lookout towers throughout Germany (see Wolfgang O. Mosch, “Neuer Aussichtsturm im Odenwald,” Die Dorfl inde: Zeitschrift des Odenwaldes 83, no. 3 [2002], 27). 87. E. Sö., “Aus dem Gästebuch des Grenzlandturmes Neualbenreuth,” EZ 15, no. 19 (October 1964): 300. 88. Wolf, “Blick über unsere Heimatgrenze,” 78. 89. “Hoch ragt der Turm der Heimat,” Der Egerländer 12, no. 8 (August 1961): 175. 90. Schmutzer, St. Anna-Gedächtniskirche, 15. 91. “ . . . steht meiner Heimat Haus, Ostern 1962 an der Grenze,” EZ 13, no. 9 (May 1962): 126. 92. Dr. S., “Miar woarn dahoim,” Der Egerländer 15, no. 7 (July 1964): 178. 93. Anton Blaha, “Unsere Schutzmantelmadonna,” EZ 14, no. 16 (August 1963): 259. 94. A.P., “15 Jahre Grenzlandturm in Neualbenreuth,” EZ 27, no. 10 (October 1976): 135. 95. “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 10, no. 9 (May 1959): 123. 96. Kluhs, “Dank an Neualbenreuth,” 64. 97. F.R., “Der Pfaffenbühl bei Mähring. Vorschlag zum Bau einer Gedächniskapelle,” HbPW 5, no. 50 (October 1952): 19–20. 98. According to the guidebook to the church of St. Anna, in 1953 Huska encouraged his compatriots to gather in Mähring, “since the view of Heimat stirs the innermost [feelings] but also gives strength to persevere in the hardest of times” (Schmutzer, Sankt Anna, 20). 99. Teresa Brennan, “‘The Contexts of Vision’ from a Specific Standpoint,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 219–23. 100. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 34. 101. Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 2. 102. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Christo’s Gates and Gilo’s Wall,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 587. 103. A. Sch., “Ein schöner Blick in die geraubte Heimat,” HbPW 18, no. 215 (July 1966): 580.

280

notes to pages 215–221

104. Anton Gebert, “Was unsere Augen sahen,” HbPW 5, no. 6 (September 1953): 585 (fi rst quotation); Alois Philipp, “In Gedanken zurück nach Mähring,” HbPW 13, no. 157 (September 1961): 752 (second quotation). 105. Dr. H., “‘Heimat’” I, 5. 106. “Blick über die Heimatgrenze,” HbPW 5, no. 58 (June 1953): 417. 107. Weber, “Ein Fernblick über die Grenze,” 10. 108. Gebert, “Was unsere Augen sahen,” 585. 109. Josef Czerny, “Zur Pilgerschaft nach Mähring,” HbPW 5, 54 (February 1953): 262; “Der Plan-Weseritzer Kreis weiht an der Grenze eine Sankt-AnnaKapelle,” Der Egerländer 4, no. 9 (September 1953): 240. 110. Programs appeared yearly in the newsletter’s July issue. The cited activities are based on HbPW 14, no. 167 (July 1962): 570. 111. “Das Treffen in Mähring—unser bisher größtes Erlebnis,” HbPW 5, no. 60 (August 1953): 525. 112. Willi Junker, “Gedanken an Mähring,” HbPW 5, no. 61 (September 1953): 581–82. 113. K. Reger, “Tausende kamen zum 15. Plan-Weseritzer Heimattreffen nach Tirschenreuth und Mähring,” Der Egerländer 18, no. 8/9 (August/September 1967), 199. 114. Betty Künl, “Zur Erinnerung an die St.-Anna-Kapelle bei Mähring” (in Schmutzer, Sankt Anna), 19. 115. “Grenzlandfahrt. Bericht für jene Heimatvertriebene,” 144. 116. Erhard Joseph Knobloch, “An der Grenze,” Sudetenland 9, no. 2 (Spring 1967): 135. 117. Kluhs, “Dank an Neualbenreuth,” 64. 118. Götz-Kollmer, “An der Grenze,” 37. 119. Schürrer, “Grenzwanderungen,” 209. 120. Anton Schreiegg, “Heimat an der Grenze,” EZ 16, no. 20 (October 1965): 287. 121. Julius Ertel, “An der Grenze,” HbPW 18, no. 215 (July 1966): 577. 122. Margareta Pschorn, “An Böhmens Grenze,” Der Egerländer 20, no. 6 (June 1969): 156. 123. Skalitzky, “Über die Grenze,” Sudetenland 11, no. 2 (Spring 1969): 108. 124. Trautl Irgang, “An der Grenze,” EZ 35, no. 9 (September 1984): 161. ˇ SSR,” EZ 40, no. 11 (November 125. Alois Wanka, “Abend an der Grenze/C 1989): 210. 126. On the lookout towers at the German–German border, see Eckert, “‘Greetings from the Zonal Border,’” 12. 127. “‘Steht meiner Heimat Haus’ . . . und droben steht die Kapelle,” EZ 14, no. 5 (March 1963): 69. 128. Lutzau, “Grenzlandfahrt der Gmoi Erding,” 12.

notes to pages 222–230

281

129. Friedrich Arnold to Eusebius Bock, 2 February 1963, PfaArch–N, MFr, uncatalogued. 130. Other local and expelled literati who addressed this topic include Robert Lindenbaum, Franz Liebl, and Anton Schreiegg (see “Das große Treffen an der Grenze,” Der Egerländer 13, no. 10 [October 1962]: 225). 131. Leni Wunderlich, “Gedanken zum Bau des Aussichtsturmes,” EZ 10, no. 13 (July 1959): 180. 132. Christof Reinl, “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 11, no. 14 (July 1960): 205 (quotation); Reger, “Die Abschlußfeier.” 133. “Turmbau in Neualbenreuth,” Der Egerländer 11, no. 11 (November 1960): 256. 134. “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 12, no. 13 (July 1961): 192; A.P., “20 Jahre Grenzlandturm Neualbenreuth,” EZ 32, no. 9 (September 1981): 131. 135. “Bekenntnis zur angestammten Heimat,” 121. 136. “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 10, no. 14 (July 1959): 199. 137. “Sommerfest beim Grenzlandturm Neualbenreuth,” EZ 16, no. 15/16 (August 1965): 227. 138. “Hoch ragt der Turm der Heimat,” 175. 139. “Ausklang am Heimatturm Neualbenreuth,” HbPW 15, no. 171 (November 1962): 73. 140. See, e.g., HbPW 33, no. 396 (August 1981): 621. 141. E. Sö., “Aus dem Gästebuch,” 300. See also A.P., “20 Jahre Grenzlandturm Neualbenreuth,” EZ 32, no. 9 (September 1981): 131. 142. “Hauptversammlung der ‘Arge’ Neualbenreuth,” EZ 40, no. 5 (May 1989): 94. 143. “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 10, no. 14 (July 1959): 199 (fi rst quotation); “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 10, no. 9 (May 1959): 122 (second quotation). 144. “Der Grenzlandturm im ‘neuen Kleid,’” EZ 17, no. 12 (June 1966): 172; A.P., “20 Jahre Grenzlandturm Neualbenreuth,” EZ 32, no. 9 (September 1981): 131. 145. “Der Grenzlandturm zu Neualbenreuth,” Der Egerländer 13, no. 8/9 (August/September 1962): 205. 146. Wunderlich, “. . . steht meiner Heimat Haus,” EZ 11, no. 18 (September 1960): 254. 147. Wunderlich, “Zur Einweihung des Grenzlandturmes,” EZ 12, no. 10 (May 1961): 151. 148. E. Sö., “Wenn Freunde an der Grenze steh’n. Grenzlandfahrt der Patenstadt Amberg mit dem Vorstand des Egerer Landtages e.V.,” EZ 14, no. 15 (August 1963): 236. 149. “Sommerfest beim Grenzlandturm Neualbenreuth,” 227.

282

notes to pages 231–236

150. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 113; Lutz Koepnick, Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 1. 151. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 128. 152. “Hebfeier am Turm von Neualbenreuth,” Der Egerländer 11, no. 11 (November 1960): 256. 153. “Grenzlandfahrt: Bericht für jene Heimatvertriebenen,” 144. 154. Koepnick, Framing Attention, 3. 155. Löschner, “Ewig liebe Heimat,” 10. 156. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. John Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 57. 157. Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 1. 158. Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision, 77 (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944), 77, cited in Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 119. 159. Crary, Techniques of the Observer; De Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 17.

Epilogue 1. BayHSta: MInn 80310 III, 23231, 426, 3187/53, 11 September 1953; MInn 80310 III, 23231, 426; MInn 80310 III, 23231, 426, 3187/53, 26 May 1953; and MInn 80310 III, 23231, 426, 1007/53, 13 May 1953. 2. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, introduction to Cold War Modern: Design, 1945–1970 (London: V&A, 2008), 13 (fi rst quotation); Michael L. Dockrill and Michael F. Hopkins, The Cold War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1 (second quotation). 3. Wayne D. Cocroft and Roger J. C. Thomas, Cold War: Building for Nuclear Confrontation, 1946–1989 (Swindon: English Heritage, 2003), 3. 4. Crowley and Pavitt, introduction to Cold War Modern, 13. 5. John Whalen-Bridge, “Some Versions of the Cold War,” American Literature 74, no. 3 (September 2002): 620. 6. “Draft. Guidance on the Closing of East Germany in Latin America, Asia, and Africa,” 17 August 1961, Hoover Institution Archives, RFE/RL Corporate Records, 155/4. 7. Davis, Stages of Emergency, 2. The German weekly Der Spiegel mentioned “stage sets for the last act of the political East-West tragedy” as early as 1948 (see “Zossen,” Der Spiegel 2, no. 32 [August 1948]: 2). Recent invocations appear in Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 6–7. 8. “Pathos formula” (Pathosformel) is a term coined by Aby Warburg in his 1905 essay “Der Tod des Orpheus. Bilder zu dem Vortrag über Dürer und die italienische Antike.”

notes to pages 237–240

283

9. Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2011), 47. 10. Eisch, Grenze, 116. 11. Hell, “Ruins Travel: Orphic Travel Through 1940s Germany,” in Hell and Schönle, Ruins of Modernity,” 126. 12. John Orr, Tragic Realism and Modern Society: The Passionate Political in the Modern Novel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 5–10. 13. Sheffer, Burned Bridge (2008), 2. 14. Eisch, “‘Doch die Erinnerung, die bleibt mir stets gewiß,’” 31; Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 303. 15. See, among others, Bill Niven, ed., Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger, eds., Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009); and Helmut Schmitz and Annette Seidel-Arpacı, eds., Narratives of Trauma: Discourses of German Suffering in National and International Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011). 16. Niven, Germans as Victims, 281–82, pares a bibliography on the expulsion of Germans down to one page only. See also Louis Ferdinand Helbig, “Von der ‘Vertriebenenliteratur’ zur ‘Vertreibungsliteratur’—eine Literaturbilanz 1945– 1995,” in Trauer und Zuversicht: Literatur der Heimatvertriebenen in Bayern, ed. Peter Fassl and Berndt Herrmann (Augsburg: Pröll, 1995), 26. 17. Hahn and Hahn, Vertreibung im deutschen Erinnern, 561–67. 18. Sudeten German poetry of the 1990s has been collated but not extensively interpreted in Peter Becher’s “‘Der letzte Autobus Richtung Heimat’: Sudetendeutsche Lyrik der 90er Jahre,” in Zur Ikonographie des Heimwehs, 175–93. Comparable sources from the interwar period, in contrast, have received considerable critical attention; see Christian Jäger, Minoritäre Literatur: Das Konzept der kleinen Literatur am Beispiel prager- und sudetendeutscher Werke (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 2005). 19. Demshuk, The Lost German East. 20. Classic examples include Robert G. Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 123–70; and von Moltke, No Place Like Home. 21. Kurt Glaser, Die Tschecho-Slowakei: Politische Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Nationalitätenstaates (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1964), 10. 22. Elisabeth Fendl, “In Szene gesetzt: Populäre Darstellungen von Flucht und Vertreibung,” in Zur Ästhetik des Verlusts: Bilder von Heimat, Flucht und Vertreibung (Münster: Waxmann, 2010), 59. 23. Von Moltke, “Location Heimat: Tracking Refugee Images, from DEFA to the Heimatfi lm,” in Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, ed. John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (New York: Bergahn Books, 2007), 77. 24. See, e.g., Kossert, Kalte Heimat, 121–27, 306–12.

284

notes to page 240

25. See Peter Fritzsche, “What Exactly is Vergangenheitsbewältigung? Narrative and Its Insufficiency in Postwar Germany,” in German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, ed. Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 31. 26. Stickler, “Ostdeutsch heißt gesamtdeutsch,” 359; Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen, 176. 27. Peter Fassl, “Aspekte der Literatur der Heimatvertriebenen—Annäherungen,” in Fassl and Herrmann, Trauer und Zuversicht, 9. 28. Leo Schmidt and Henriette von Preuschen, On Both Sides of the Wall: Preserving Monuments and Sites of the Cold War Era/Auf beiden Seiten der Mauer: Denkmalpfl ege an Objekten aus der Zeit des Kalten Krieges (Bad Münstereifel: Westkreuz, 2005); John Schofield and Wayne Cocroft, A Fearsome Heritage: Diverse Legacies of the Cold War (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007).

Index Ackermann-Gemeinde, 115, 150 Adenauer, Konrad, 74 Adler, Ludwig, 189 Adolph, R., 180, 182 Alberti, Leon Battista, 214, 232 Aleichem, Sholem, 37 allochrony, 169 Als, Hilton, 60 Altötting, 89, 92 Altvater Tower, 210 Anderson, Wes, 52 apocalypse plays, 70, 259n3. See also folklore Arendt, Hannah, 42, 130 arma Christi, 102–3 Arnold, Friedrich, 222 Asch/Aš, 3, 140, 176; Reipirch on, 164, 168 Auerbach, Erich, 237 Austro-Hungarian Military Geographical Institute, 159–60 Bailey, Anthony, 133 Bärnau, 3, 70, 183–84 Barthes, Roland, 8, 13, 63–64, 168–69 Bartl, Ernst, 28, 136, 224, 226; Egerland einst und jetzt, 33–34, 36–65, 67–69; and Lorenz, 195; and Scherbaum, 113 Bartl, Walter, 38 Bauer, Wilhelm, 114, 115 Baumann, Zygmunt, 178 Bavarian Border Police (Bayerische Grenzpolizei), 32, 92, 104, 123; and “mutilated Savior,” 96–97; and tourists, 139–40, 142–52, 161

Bavarian State Planning Board, 136 Becher, Walter, 161 Beneš Decrees, 15, 26; and Radio Free Europe, 144 Benjamin, Walter, 113, 130; on angel of history, 53–55; on photography, 64 Berdahl, Daphne, 81, 162, 177 Berlin, 10, 12, 40, 41 Berlin Wall, 10, 115, 127, 211, 236 Bhabha, Homi, 176–77 Bienek, Horst, 239 Biess, Frank, 35–36 bifocalism, nostalgic. See nostalgia binoculars, use of, 101, 142, 176, 187, 201, 216, 230 Bildungsroman, 135 Bismarck, Otto von, 52 Bismarck Tower, 210 Blaha, Johann Andreas, 70, 156–58, 192, 211 Bohemian Forest bards (Böhmerwalddichter), 23–30, 70, 170, 187–91, 239 Bohemian Forest League (Böhmerwaldbund), 23–27, 70 Böhm, Adolf, 182 Böhmerwäldler, 129–33, 147, 151–53 Boletice/Polletitz, 32 border guards: Czechoslovak, 78, 104, 146, 148, 152, 176–77, 194, 219, 221; East German, 237; West German, 60, 68, 234 borderland literature, 6, 8, 23–27, 44, 129–33, 140 borderland poems, 4, 30, 182, 191–92, 195, 208–9, 220–22, 228, 230

286 borderland reportage, 16–17, 131–40, 162–75; and border awareness, 26, 137, 162–63, 172, 174 Brahms, Johannes, 52 Brodsky, Joseph, 158 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 207 Bryson, Norman, 184 Bühler, Karl, 202–5 Bundesgrenzschutz (Federal Border Police), 32, 173 Bundesvertriebenengesetz (Federal Refugee and Expellee Law), 18–19 Bunte Steine (Stifter), 197 canon: of Christian iconography, 28–29, 70, 81–83, 88, 116, 121; cultural, 13–14, 23, 238–39; literary, 195, 222; of popular piety, 70–71, 78–79; of ruin imagery, 52, 58; and Stifter, 140 Carlsbad/Karlovy Vary, 3, 37, 46, 52–54 Catholic Women’s Movement, 114 Chambers, Ross, 174 Cheb. See Eger Chodová Planá/Kuttenplan, 80 Christianity, 24, 57, 67–69, 72–74, 77, 91–92, 99, 102–5, 113–14, 118, 121–22, 140; and anticommunism, 69, 73–75 Christ unterwegs (periodical), 88 Churchill, Winston, 1, 9, 18, 22, 72, 133, 193 Claasen, Hermann, 41, 47–48 Cosgrove, Denis, 20 Crary, Jonathan, 121 Cuba, religion in, 80 Davis, Richard H., 122 Davis, Tracy C., 133 Day After, The (fi lm), 53 Deep in the Bohemian Forest (Tief drin im Böhmerwald) (song), 147 defacement. See iconoclasm deixis, 202–5 Demshuk, Andrew, 17, 239 Deutsche Ostkunde (periodical), 132 Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund (German Bohemian Forest League), 22 Dietl, High Commissioner, 94–97, 99 digression, literary, 138, 174, 237 Donner, Josef, 71–72 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 37 Dreisessel/Trˇístolicˇník, 150–51, 155,

Index 158–59; literature about, 130, 151–54; map of, 3; Tillen and, 151, 156, 158, 161 Dresden, 40, 41 Dürer, Albrecht, 214 Durkheim, Emile, 92 Dylenˇ. See Tillen Eckert, Astrid, 146 ecology, 22, 51; human, 14, 28, 69, 126 economic calamity zones, 6, 149 Eger, 55–58, 140, 166, 173; Bartl on, 33–34, 36–65, 67–69; from Mähring tower, 215; map of, 3; from Neualbenreuth tower, 232; Reipirch on, 166, 169–71 Egerer Zeitung (periodical), 175, 221 Egerland einst und jetzt (Bartl), 33–34, 36–65, 67–69 Egerländer, Der (periodical), 39, 226 Eichsfeld, 23, 81 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 74, 77 Ensslin, Gudrun, 195 Erbstein, Max, 259n3 Ertel, Julius, 219 Eschlkam, 3, 70 Europe’s midpoint, 136–37, 158–62, 167, 209, 222. See also Tillen “expelled Madonna,” 82–95, 110, 120, 122 expulsion of Sudeten Germans, 44–45, 50–51; and literature, 238–39 fear, 20, 132, 155, 211; of atheism, 75; of carpet bombing, 35; of nuclear destruction, 38, 55, 73–74, 78, 195–96; production of, 171–73 Fechter, Peter, 237 Federal Border Police (Bundesgrenzschutz), 32, 173 Federal Refugee and Expellee Law (Bundesvertriebenengesetz), 18–19 Felbick, Dieter, 35 Fichtelgebirge, 6, 149, 170, 231 Fleming, Ian, 53 folklore, 4, 10; and apocalypse plays, 70, 259n3; of Bohemian Forest bards, 24–27; of Dreisessel mountain, 151–54; of gnomes, 156; of mythical beasts, 26. See also Marian cults Fontane, Theodore, 222 Foucault, Michel, 184 framing, 231–32; and artifacts, 83, 109–11,

Index 116–18; and narrative, 69, 174, 235–37; and windows, 214 Franzensbad/Františkovy Lázneˇ, 3, 37 Freedberg, David, 93, 109, 117 “freedom train,” 7, 164 Free Europe Committee, 236 Freimut, Ernst, 156 Freud, Sigmund, 153, 174 Fried, Erich, 239 Friedberg, Anne, 232, 233 Friedrich, Caspar David, 200 Furth im Wald, 3, 70, 143 Fussell, Paul, 128 Gamboni, Dario, 102 gaze, theories of, 184–85 Gebauer, Emil, 95 Gebetswall. See prayer wall Geiger, Hugo, 125, 136–38, 142 Geislingen, 36 German Bohemian Forest League (Deutscher Böhmerwaldbund), 22 German economic miracle, 42, 73, 127, 145, 165 German expellee lobby, 18, 161, 238, 240 gesture. See deixis glass industry, 21, 45, 68, 92, 198 Glaube und Heimat (periodical), 88 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 6, 37, 45, 52 Götz-Kollmer, Annie, 182–83, 219 Grass, Günter, 239 Greiner, Bernd, 171–72 Grillinger, Franz, 84–90, 93; successor of, 91 Grimm brothers, 24 Gröning, Bruno, 89 Grothewohl, Otto, 169 Grueber, Bernhard, 19, 22, 25, 156 Grünberg/Zelená Hora, 210 Gruß, Franz, 222 guidebooks, 20, 126, 131, 138–39. See also tourism Günther, Adolf, 75–77, 106 Haatling, Peter, 239 Halberstadt, 41 Hammermühle, 63 Hampel, Paul, 96, 97, 99–103, 120, 140 Hans, Erich, 147, 166 Harvey, Elizabeth, 133

287 Hatzenreuth, 3, 70, 106 Heilsbronn, 114 Heimat, 16, 18, 173, 177; and destruction, 40–53, 63–64; prayer wall as substitute for, 72, 99; and tourism, 178. See also “look into the Heimat” Heimatblätter. See homeland leaflets Heroldsbach, 86 Hess, Jonathan, 13 Heuss, Theodor, 142 Hitler, Adolf. See Nazi Germany Hobsbawm, Eric, 121 Hochwald, Der (Stifter), 129–31, 151–52 Hof, 10, 128, 164 Hofer, Johannes, 30, 205–7 Hohenberg an der Eger, 146 Holland Day, Fred, 111–12, 116, 117 homeland leaflets, 16–17, 132, 163, 175, 199, 238 homesickness, 6, 7, 146, 158, 205. See also nostalgia Höritz, 70 Hoyer, Franz A., 41 Huemer-Kreiner, Fritz, 209–10 Hundsbach, 97 Huska, Adolf, 213–15, 218, 231, 279n98 iconoclasm, 4; and artifacts, 120–23; and the prayer wall, 28–29, 68–69, 71, 77–78, 84, 96–98, 102–3 indexicality, of photographs, 51–63, 202–5 Irgang, Trautl, 220 Jägershof, 3, 70 Jakobitreffen (St. Jacob’s Day), 152 Jaspers, Karl, 207 Judson, Pieter, 139 Jungbauer, Gustav, 24–25 Junker, Willi, 216–17 Kaiserwald, 167 Kapellenberg tower, 210 Karasek-Langer, Alfred, 71, 82, 87, 91, 110, 239–40; and Schroubek, 122 Karlovy Vary/Carlsbad, 3, 37, 46, 52–54 Kaschnitz, Marie-Luise, 195 Klement, Berta, 154 Klenze, Leo von, 140 Konnersreuth, 105

288 Köstler, Meinhard, 224, 226 Krejcˇí, Johann “Jan,” 20–22 Kremsmünster, 190 Kronach, 234 Kronstorf, 104 Kubelka, Margarete, 189 Kubin, Alfred, 140 Künl, Betty, 209, 218 Kuttenplan/Chodová Planá, 80 Lacan, Jacques, 184 Lackenhäuser, 70, 154 Lam, 147 landscapes, 136–37, 150, 152, 156; Bartl on, 44, 50, 55; cultural, 23, 29, 84, 136, 226; Reipirch on, 169–70 Langford, Martha, 14 Last Year at Marienbad (fi lm), 37 Lehnerl, Anton, 187 Lenz, Siegfried, 239 Liebl, Franz, 281n130 Lindenbaum, Robert, 281n130 Linz, 114 Lisle, Debbie, 165 “look into the Heimat,” 167–70, 180–84, 191–92, 209–16, 223–24, 229–31 Lorenz, Franz, 191–97, 220, 223 Lotman, Yuri, 188 Madonnas. See Marian cults Magerl, Emil, 192 Magritte, René, 56, 64 Mähring, 148, 166; lookout tower at, 183–84, 215, 217; map of, 3; as pilgrimage site, 209, 212–18; St. Anna’s chapel at, 213–18, 279n98 Mally, Leo Hans, 23, 27, 70 Marian cults, 4, 78–82, 93; and “expelled Madonna,” 82–95, 110, 111, 120, 122; and Immaculate Conception, 91; and “Madonna with a Rose,” 80; and Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 88; and St. Mary of Peace, 221–22; and Virgin of Mercy, 211. See also folklore Marienbad/Mariánské Lázneˇ, 3, 37 Marienbad-Tepler Heimatbrief (periodical), 190 Markhausen, 63 Marrow, James, 102 Marshall Plan, 74

Index Massey, Doreen, 9 miracles. See religious miracles Mittag, Der (periodical), 234–35 Mitteilungsblatt der Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft, 17 Mitterfi rmiansreut, 29, 70, 105, 125, 146, 151; “expelled Madonna” of, 82–95, 110, 111, 120, 122; map of, 3; population of, 86 Morgan, David, 115, 117, 120, 122 Müller, Adalbert, 19, 22, 25, 156 Murdock, Caitlin, 8 “mutilated Savior,” 94–123, 140; photography of, 100, 108, 110–20 myths. See folklore Naumann, Klaus, 34 Nazi Germany, 14–15, 21, 25, 165 Neualbenreuth, 70, 218; and Europe’s midpoint, 160, 161; lookout tower at, 183–84, 208–11, 219, 221–33; map of, 3 Neukirchen beim Heilig Blut, 92 Neumann, Balthasar, 45 Neumann, Johann Nepomuk, 154 Neumann, Therese, 105 Neumugl/Nové Mohelno, 80 nostalgia, 6–7, 30, 146, 158, 205, 218–21; bifocalism of, 179–85, 189–91, 203–7, 213, 218–21, 233; imperative of, 185–98, 207 nuclear weapons, 42, 55, 73–74, 195. See also fear Orr, John, 237 Osser, Mount, 143, 147, 148; Lorenz on, 191–97, 223 Ottengrün, 80 Panofsky, Erwin, 214 Passau, 2, 3, 89–91, 93, 128, 198 Passion of Jesus Christ, 74–75, 95–97, 102–4 peace, in the Cold War, 128–29, 137–39, 175–76, 210–11, 219–20 People’s Alliance for Peace and Freedom (Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit), 234 Peter, Richard, Sr., 41, 47–48 Pfaffenbühl, 215–17 Pforzheim, 41

Index Phantasien im Böhmerwald (Kubin), 140 photography, 32–33; Barthes on, 63–64; Bartl on, 48–65; Benjamin on, 64; captions of, 56–58, 63–65, 98; and family albums, 186, 198–205; and indexicality, 51–63, 202–5; of “mutilated Savior,” 100, 108, 110–20; Sontag on, 64; “vernacular,” 14, 27, 181, 237 Piedmontese sacri monti, 70 pilgrimage sites, 4, 69–72, 89–91; at Altötting, 89, 92; at Dreisessel, 151; at Mähring, 209, 212–18; at Wies, 94, 97, 98. See also tourism Plan/Planá, 3, 203, 213, 215–16 Plöckenstein/Plechý, 130, 150–52 Plößberg, 164 Pocock, Isaac, 1, 137, 237 Polletitz/Boletice, 32 porcelain factories, 45, 92, 149, 165, 168, 173 postwar reconstruction, 15, 42, 46, 57–58, 210 Potsdam Conference (1945), 15, 19, 126 prayer wall, 27–28, 33–35, 120–23, 150, 211; and architecture, 30, 47, 53, 58, 218, 232; Bartl on, 36, 38, 39; building of, 4–5, 33, 38, 70–72, 183; history of, 7, 70 Pröbstle, Franz, 89–90 Protection of State Borders Law (1951), 15 Pschorn, Margareta, 219 Pupp Hotel, 52–53 Questel, Roland, 211 Radio Free Europe (RFE), 141, 144, 236 Rauscher, Josef, 231 realism, tragic, 8, 14, 55, 83, 88, 93, 123, 139–40, 236–37 “reality effect,” Barthes on, 8, 56–57, 169 redemption, 82, 103, 110, 118, 172 Reichenberger, Emmanuel, 95 Reinl, Christof, 224–25 Reipirch, Franz, 162–75, 212–15 religious miracles, 78, 84, 86, 92, 110, 209 Rentschler, Eric, 50 Resnais, Alain, 37 revisionism, territorial, 18, 38, 72, 146, 177, 238–39 RFE. See Radio Free Europe Riefenstahl, Leni, 52

289 Riehl, Heinrich, 21 Riemer, Franz, 89–91, 93 Rittsteig, 3, 70 Rohrbach, Oskar, 173 Rohrmeier, Martin, 97, 99, 103–6, 111, 114–15, 120 Roma people, 15, 56, 58 Rosenauer, Franz, 84, 86 Rosenberger Gut, 152 Rosenquist, James, 239 Ruff, Josef, 46 ruins, 32–36, 55, 63; Bartl on, 36–65; photography’s indexicality of, 51–63; and rubble, 42–43, 50, 53, 57–58; Steinmetz on, 39–40; urban vs. rural, 40–44 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 184, 194 Schauwecker, Heinz, 208–9, 222, 278n76 Scherbaum, Kurt, 100, 112–14 Schieder, Theodor, 239–40 Schiller, Friedrich von, 1, 45, 138, 237 Schirnding, 3, 140, 168 Schmidt, Maximilian, 139 Schneider, Peter, 13 Schreiegg, Anton, 219, 281n130 Schroubek, Georg A., 71, 123, 182, 209; and “expelled Madonna,” 84–86; and “mutilated Savior,” 99, 105; and nostalgic bifocalism, 207, 233 Schumann, Conrad, 237 Schwain, Kristin, 117, 118 Sebald, W. G., 40, 41, 46, 60 Selb, 3, 166; porcelain factories of, 149, 165, 173 Shafer, Sagi, 12–13 Shahn, Ben, 239 Shakespeare, William, 1 Sheffer, Edith, 9, 10 Sieghardt, August, 22, 131, 137, 146, 147, 152–54 Simmel, Georg, 55, 57, 109 Skalitzky, Maria, 147, 166 Skalitzky, Sepp, 23, 26–27, 70, 175; on nostalgia, 183, 219–20; photograph of, 147, 148 Society for the Bavarian Forest, 22, 154 Sontag, Susan, 64 spa culture, 36–37, 52–54 Stadlern, 183–84 Staehlin, Carlos María, 78

Index

290 St. Anna’s chapel, Mähring, 213–18, 279n98 Steinberg, 70 Steinmetz, George, 39 Stifter, Adalbert, 5, 6, 23–24, 30, 139, 140; on “gentle law,” 192, 197; and Lorenz, 195–97; nostalgic bifocalism of, 189–91; and tourism, 125, 129–33, 154, 176 Stifter, Adalbert, works of: Bunte Steine, 197; Der Hochwald, 129–31, 151–52; Witiko, 151, 152 Stifter, Emma, 179–82, 186, 190, 204, 218–19, 233 St. Jacob’s Day, 152 St. Mary of Peace chapel, Neualbenreuth, 221–22 Sudetendeutsche, Der (periodical), 186 Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft (SdL), 161, 211 Sudetendeutscher Erzieherbrief (periodical), 132 Sudetendeutsches Golgatha (Gebauer), 95 Sudetendeutsches Passion (Reichenberger), 95 Sudetendeutsche Zeitung (SdZ), 17 Sudetenland, the, 15, 19, 36, 38, 78, 80, 128, 182, 209, 223 surveillance, 61, 161, 166, 176, 182–84, 210, 231–33 Thirty Years War, 40, 129, 171, 205 Tief drin im Böhmerwald (Deep in the Bohermian Forest) (song), 147 Tillen, 154–62, 161, 220–23; and Dreisessel, 151, 156, 158, 161; Europe’s midpoint at, 158–62, 167, 209, 222; map of, 3 Tirschenreuth, 3, 144, 146, 216 tourism, 88–90, 125–28; “battlefield,” 175–76; and Baumann, 178; “dark,” 139; and Geiger, 125, 136–38, 142; and guidebooks, 20, 126, 131, 138–39; and photo albums, 186, 198–205; and Stifter, 125, 129–33, 154; and travelogues, 4, 126, 131–40, 162–75. See also pilgrimage sites towers, lookout, 183–84, 208–11, 215–19, 221–33 Treml, Robert, 111 Trißl, Josef, 224–25

Trˇístolicˇník. See Dreisessel/Trˇístolicˇník Tweed, Thomas A., 77 Ullrich, Maren, 177 uncanny, Freud’s notion of, 153 United States Information Agency, 74 Unterlichtbuchet Chapel, 84, 86, 87 Upper Palatine Forest, 6, 21, 92, 138, 147, 226 Verein Bayerwald, 22, 154 “vernacular” portrayals, 14, 27, 181, 237 Veronica’s sudarium, 117 Vesper, Bernward, 195 Vidler, Anthony, 47 Virgin Mary, apparitions of, 4, 78–81, 86, 89. See also Marian cults visual nostalgia. See nostalgia Voh, Oswald, 49–51 Volksbote, Der (periodical), 142, 191 Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit (People’s Alliance for Peace and Freedom), 234 Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem, 72 Waldsassen, 2, 82–83, 105, 159; map of, 3; “mutilated Savior” of, 94–123; Reipirch on, 165–66, 173 Wallenstein, Albrecht von, 45 Wanka, Alois, 220–21 Watzlik, Hans, 23–27, 147, 239 Wegner, Werner, 234–36 Weitzer, Josef, 187–88 Wenzig, Josef, 20–22 Wessely, Herbert, 207 Widenthal, Lora, 17 Wies, 94, 97, 98, 107, 118 Wiesnet, Josef, 96, 110, 111 windows, use of, 179, 212–14, 221, 232–33 Winter, Karl, 23, 27 Witiko (Stifter), 151, 152 Wunderlich, Leni, 222–23, 228–30 Yalta Conference (1945), 126 Zelená Hora/Grünberg, 210 Zerlik, Otto, 27 Zirlik, Hans, 115–18 Zwiesel, 198