Read all about it

Here it is: my photo-book documenting the people and places of the Iron Curtain as they are today, twenty years after the revolutions of 1989:

http://bit.ly/5JvJ2x  

The entire book can be viewed at this link (it can, of course, be bought, too; only a couple of euros/pounds/dollars of the purchase price gets to my pocket - I didn't do this for the money!). I'd be grateful for any feedback (paulkbxl@gmail.com), and please do forward the link to anyone that might find the subject interesting.

I've also set up a Facebook page for the book, should anyone want to become a 'fan':

http://www.facebook.com/pages/FRAGMENTS/197574066309

It's a year since I returned from my bicycle journey down the route of the old Iron Curtain. In the last post of the trip I promised to turn the material I had gathered into something more durable. It's taken me a lot longer than intended: I have been distracted by a new job, my first property purchase and a burglary that took all my photography equipment (but luckily not my photographs) and a laptop on which I'd written early texts for the book. 

But I hope it will have been worth the wait and that it will get across the most interesting experiences of my journey. The 160 pages contain more than 150 photographs with captions and descriptions, arranged in chapters according to the countries of the section of the border (Germany-Germany, Austria-Slovakia etc.) Each chapter has an introductory text.

This is the book's front cover, showing an abandoned military watchtower at a spot on the border between Italy and Slovenia, near the city of Trieste. Below it I have copied the first few paragraphs of the introductory chapter. The story it tells will be familiar to those who followed the blog while I was on the road a year ago.

 

"EVERY YEAR in mid-August, on the edge of the German village of Wiesenfeld, crowds gather outside the house of Robert Hohmann. The visitors sing and make speeches. Robert used to want to play loud music over their speeches and go out to argue with the crowd. Now he ignores them.

Robert’s house lies near the geographical centre of Germany, in the rural state of Thüringen, just a few hundred yards from the line that divided the country for over forty years, from the end of the Second World War until November 1989, when revolution in East Germany led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. The crowds that arrive in Robert’s road every summer come to commemorate Rudi Arnstadt, an East German border guard killed by a West German border patrol in 1962, at the top of the low hill that separated the two states.  The memorial to the martyred 35-year-old captain stands in a small public garden opposite Robert’s house.

Wiesenfeld was a frontier village, on the eastern side of the dividing line, and Arnstadt was posted there just a few months before his death. On 14 August he was among a group of two hundred soldiers erecting new metal fences along the border.  A year earlier East Germany had surprised the world with a highly-planned overnight operation to roll out the first barbed wire barricades between East and West Berlin. Since then it had been reinforcing its physical barriers to the West, in Berlin and all along what became known as the inner-German border. Tensions were high. At Wiesenfeld an altercation led to an exchange of gunfire in which a young West German soldier named Hans Plüschke shot Arnstadt dead.

The East German regime extracted full propaganda value from the affair: Rudi Arnstadt was made into a national hero who had died in defence of the socialist fatherland. Schools and roads were named after him. Hans Plüschke left the West German border guard in 1970, and given a licence to carry firearms at all times, as protection against reprisal missions sent across the divide. As the two Germanies grew apart, he built a quiet living as a taxi driver.

Today, nearly fifty years after Arnstadt’s death, and twenty years after German re-unification swept away the fences outside Wiesenfeld, several busloads of aging friends, colleagues and sympathisers still come each year to the Arnstadt memorial, to sing patriotic East German songs and reminisce about the good old days.

Robert has reason to resent the visitors. As the communist East German regime strengthened its grip on power after the war, agricultural land around Wiesenfeld was collectivised. By the end of the 1950s, Robert’s father was the only farmer who had refused to join the local cooperative. Since the regime wanted only politically reliable people in the sensitive frontier zone, the young family was forced to move away from the border, to the city of Magdeburg. When Rudi Arnstadt arrived for border duty a few months later, he was housed in the Hohmann family’s empty home. 

Over thirty years later, after Germany had re-unified in 1990, Robert lost his job in Magdeburg. Eventually he decided to reclaim the family’s property and move back to Wiesenfeld, the village he had left as a toddler.  He has renovated the old house and he and his mother now live a peaceful and happy life there. At first the annual arrival of Arnstadt’s supporters was a disruptive reminder of the past. Robert’s mother still finds their presence too painful and stays inside all day. Sometimes the visitors ask to visit Arnstadt’s old room. Robert refuses, but these days he feels pity, not anger, towards them. He says they are sad people with nothing left in life but the past. He often wants to challenge them on the East German regime’s treatment of people like his family, but feels reconciliation is more important. ‘The situation is over, you can’t change it. What happened happened,’ he says. ‘It’s a new time. We have to look to the future, to accept everyone and to work together.’

Meanwhile, Hans Plüschke never spoke publicly about Arnstadt’s shooting until, in 1997, on the 35th anniversary of the incident, he went on television to discuss his involvement for the first time. Seven months later, he was discovered dead in his car by the roadside, just a few kilometres from the spot where he had killed Arnstadt. He was murdered by a shot fired into his right eye–the same place his own bullet had hit Arnstadt. His killer has never been found..."