An Archaeology of the Iron Curtain: Material and Metaphor, 2013
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An Archaeology of the Iron Curtain Material and Metaphor Anna McWilliams An Archaeology of the Iron Curtain Material and Metaphor An Archaeology of the Iron Curtain Material and Metaphor Anna McWilliams Södertörns högskola Södertörns högskola SE-141 89 Huddinge www.sh.se/publications Cover Photo: Anna McWilliams Cover Design: Jonathan Robson Layout: Per Lindblom & Jonathan Robson Printed by Elanders, Stockholm 2013 Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations 86 ISSN 1652-7399 ISBN 978-91-86069-78-0 (print) ISBN 978-91-86069-79-7 (digital) Södertörn Archaeological Studies 9 ISSN 1652-2559 Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 59 ISBN 978-91-7447-819-8 Contents Acknowledgements 11 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 15 Standing on the shoreline 15 The materiality of the Iron Curtain 16 Studying the Iron Curtain 17 Recording the Iron Curtain 26 Case studies 28 CHAPTER 2 A physical metaphor 31 The changing rhetoric around a wall 35 “…love walks lonely by the Berlin wall…” 38 The image of the Berlin Wall today 42 CHAPTER 3 The materiality of the Berlin Wall 45 Methods and aims 45 Background 46 On the edge of the western world 46 The material 50 Berlin today 50 The ‘enemy facing’ wall 56 Crossing over 60 Memorials and Museums 63 Back to nothing 65 CHAPTER 4 Case study 1: The Italian/Slovenian border 67 Methods and aims 68 Background 69 The town on the hill 69 Between the wars 73 WWII and new borders 73 One city becomes two 76 A border in constant change 78 The material 81 Remains of the former militarised border 81 In the company of saints and bunkers 82 Patrolling the city 90 The physical border 92 Signs 96 Crossing over 98 The border as an advertising point 104 Resisting the border 106 People and the border 111 Some concluding points 114 Reference plan and gazetteer of sites 119 CHAPTER 5 Case Study 2: The Czech/Austrian border 127 Methods and aims 128 Background 134 The castle on the rock 134 World Wars 135 A new political order 136 Militarised border in the study area 139 Guardians of the border 141 The material 144 A changing landscape 144 Fence line 145 Searching the landscape 154 Border guard stations 156 Archive studies 172 Voices from Austria 175 Some concluding points 177 Different sources – different stories 179 Reference plan and gazetteer of sites 182 CHAPTER 6 An archaeology of the Iron Curtain 187 Artefacts, text and everything else in between 187 Moving in memories 192 The experience of things 194 To go with the flow 199 The mundane war 205 An archaeology of a metaphor 209 The end of a journey 212 Sammanfattning (Summery in Swedish) 215 Bibliography 227 Acknowledgements Writing a thesis is certainly like being on a long journey. Sometimes you travel on your own and at times you are accompanied by many lovely and helpful people. If I were to thank all those who have helped me in my work the acknowledgement would probably be longer than the thesis itself. But there are some people that do deserve particular thanks. Firstly my two tutors Mats Burström and Anders Andrén who have read, commented and guided me along the way. I am indebted for the numerous suggestions and comments you have so generously provided me with. My home during these years has been at the archaeology department at Södertörn University and at the Baltic and East European Graduate School (BEEGS) at the same university. BEEGS provided a fantastic starting point where both the academic and administrative staff made the start of my journey not just an easier task, but also much more fun. Thanks to all my fellow doctoral students here for advice, comments on drafts and well deserved beers! Thank you also Jorid Palm at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies at Södertörn for all her help and support during the final stages of my work. At the archaeology department at Södertörn University I have had the opportunity to grow, learn and test ideas and doors have always been open for advice, so thanks to Kerstin Cassel, Johan Rönnby, Björn Nilsson, Hans Bolin, Niklas Eriksson and Oscar Törnqvist for their always enthusiastic support. This thesis would not exist without your help and encouragement! At Södertörn University the ‘open door policy’ has also stretched across departments and I am very grateful to those of you that have helped me find my way in disciplines that have been somewhat new to me, especially Beate Feldman Eellend, Thomas Lundén and Anne Kaun. Thanks also to my cousin Charlotte Hagström at the Ethnology department in Lund who has provided useful advice. 11 AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN Thank you Chris Beach for providing me with such great maps and illustrations which helped to lift my material in such a great way and to Jonathan Robson and Per Lindblom at Södertörn University Publications for their excellent work with the layout and graphics of this thesis. Thanks also to Rodrigo Trompiz for his always patient help and comments on my language and to Mirja Arnshav who made sure my Swedish was legible. Always making me feel welcome during visits to Stockholm University were fellow doctoral students Jenny Nyberg, Cecilia Ljung, Ingrid Berg and Elin Engström. Thank you! I must also thank everyone who helped me during my fieldwork to access areas, find information, get in contact with people or who shared their own stories and memories. Thank you Claudia Melisch and Jamie Sewell for being such lovely guides and friends during my visits to Berlin. A big thank you goes to the Swedish-Slovenian Friendship Association and in particular Lojze Hribar who has shown such interest in my work and helped me in all ways possible – even being my personal guide in Slovenia! Great help was also provided by the Nova Gorica Regional museum and the director Andrej Malnič during my fieldwork in Slovenia and by the Podyji Park administration during my fieldwork in the Czech Republic. The field- work in the Czech Republic was made possible through a grant from Albert and Maria Bergströms Stiftelse which I received in 2010. I also want to thank family and friends who have always supported and put up with me through times of stress, confusion and great excitements. A big thank you to my former colleagues, and good friends, Andrea Bradley and Sefryn Penrose for always listening, reading, commenting and generally just being there. Thank you Lisa Söderbaum-Beach who is always on the other end of a phone, Anke Marsh with whom I have shared the adventures of archaeology ever since we first started as undergraduates, Kristin Ilves with whom I have shared the aches and pains of doctoral life as well as an office during part of my research, Anders Udd for helping me see my ma- terial in a less academic and a more colourful way and to Cecilia Minning who has been a good friend and neighbour always at the ready with a cup of coffee. Thank you all for your friendship and support! Thank you to my mum and dad, Eva-Lena and Lennart Nilsson, and my sister Åsa Moberg for always showing an interest and for providing all that critical support with babysitting, dinners, wood chopping and other things that makes a stressed doctoral student’s life so much easier. And last but by no means least thank you John and Tage: to my John for always under- standing and providing all that ground service when I have had my head 12 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS stuck in a book or been locked in front of the computer for hours and days; to Tage who just gives me such joy and happiness. This is to you and to our new family member who is about to make an appearance in the very near future. Love always. Stockholm, December 2013 Anna McWilliams 13 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Standing on the shoreline Growing up on the east coast of Sweden a walk on the beach was like a treasure hunt where washed up plastic bottles or cans with Russian writing were like messages from another world. I could not see this other world but I was told that it was very different from my own. I did not know what the Iron Curtain was back then but the Baltic Sea most certainly felt like a big barrier in which Russian submarines would occasionally take a ‘wrong turn’ and surface a bit too close for comfort, a big barrier that separated ‘us’ from ‘them’ and which was to colour my views of Eastern and Western Europe. Years later I was working as a Heritage Consultant in London. Following guidelines such as Institute for Archaeologists (IFA) guidelines and best practice documents from English Heritage, I worked on Desk Based Assess- ments, Conservation Plans and Environmental Impact Assessments. I dir- ected fieldwork to mitigate the negative impacts of roadwork, new pipelines or other construction projects. Together with my colleagues we were look- ing out for the heritage of our past and making sure it was preserved for future generations, if not in situ then at least through records. There was, however, little discussion in how this heritage had come to be. What factors and processes are involved in making these sites that we investigate? What has come to fascinate me more and more whilst carrying out the work on my thesis are the processes involved in creating the past that we see around us. Heritage does not just happen; it is created and recreated as part of our history writing. To an archaeologist it should probably not come as a surprise how important the material is to the way we view and write our history, but somehow it still did.