Europe: Early Modern and Modern 1807
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern 1807 German security agencies cracked down on one militia, SCHNEIDER. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, another was prone to spring up, extending armed op- 2011. Pp. xvii, 357. $29.95. erations against Serbian and Kosovar Albanian´migre e ´s as well as symbols of the Tito state. For these reasons, The Berlin Wall still grips public attention as the iconic both main political parties in Germany distanced them- Cold War border. By shifting our focus to a less sen- selves from the Croats, treating them as a law-enforce- sational border in a rural region dividing East and West ment problem. Germany, Edith Sheffer’s brilliant book reveals how Though the Social Democratic Party initially tended geopolitical conflicts and state-imposed policing may to fight shy of potentially embarrassing entanglements have redrawn the map, but that “local actions actually of this kind, both the party leadership and elements of constituted the border” (p. 37) and the Iron Curtain was the New Left in Germany did reach out to some im- actually an improvised “living system” (p. 167). The migrant groups from the early 1960s onward. Algerian “Burned Bridge” was a medieval road, made of logs nationalists, Greek campaigners against the colonels’ burned to prevent rot, connecting the toy manufactur- dictatorship, and Spanish anti-Franco activists ob- ing towns of Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg. For tained advice, support, and occasionally quite substan- Sheffer it becomes the perfect metaphor for the Iron tial financial subsidies from their left-wing German pa- Curtain, as the new Cold War physical and mental bor- trons. Still more exotic elements, like the small Iranian der severed these towns’ interconnection, fatefully put- community, also found German champions: the student ting Sonneberg into the German Democratic Republic activist Rudi Dutschke cut his teeth as a campaigner (GDR) and Neustadt into the Federal Republic (FRG). when he helped to orchestrate a protest against a visit Starting in the 1940s and ending just after 1989, Shef- to Berlin by the Shah of Iran in June 1967. fer’s narrative demonstrates how average citizens’ local Indigenous sympathies for immigrant communities, responses normalized these new political fissures to though, tended to be shallow, instrumental, and eva- make possible the Berlin Wall’s erection and the inter- nescent. The Poles were largely ignored, being too anti- German border’s closure in 1961. socialist for the Left and too committed to the Oder- Sheffer uncovers moments of cross-border interac- Neisse frontier for the Right. Even more ideologically tion, previously forgotten because they fit less neatly congenial minorities could find themselves abruptly dis- into Iron Curtain narratives of rigid separation. Thus, carded when a more attractive outlet for protest activ- she builds on recent historiography depicting the en- ities materialized, as the Iranians discovered when the tangled everyday development of East and West Ger- Vietnam War began to dominate the headlines. many, and she helps explain both the border’s fluidity Alexander Clarkson’s treatment of the relationship and its encroaching strictness. Her examples are strik- between the German state and the´migre e ´ groups in the ing. From 1949 to 1951 the GDR organized public re- Federal Republic is soundly researched and clearly ar- lations events, including soccer matches between the gued. But it is also rather narrow in focus. Relying as two towns, mass shopping trips to Neustadt, and invi- he does mainly on state archives and newspaper ac- tations to Western Leftists to participate in propaganda counts, the security problems raised by the presence of events. The regime soon realized it could not control these communities on German soil in the context of these crossings as planned, just as it could not stem broader Cold War antagonisms is heavily emphasized. smuggler traffic or refugees to the West. In a chicken- By contrast, the question of “the integration of ethnic and-egg quandary, the border created troubles of smug- minorities into the cultural and political institutions of gling and migration, which in turn legitimized the [the] host society” (p. 186), which the author rightly rec- creeping disciplining of the frontier as an entity. ognizes as an important part of the story, receives much Sheffer revises views of the border as a solely Eastern less attention. Nor is there much in the way of a com- bloc imposition by showing how various types of actors parative context here, a curious omission in light of the constituted the border. Frontier residents on both sides fact that neighboring countries at precisely the same neglected to question openly the border’s legitimacy. In time were facing similar challenges, but responding to the early years of the still porous border, Neustadt cit- them in very different ways. Many of the problems izens found their situation on the Western frontier ec- Clarkson describes have escalated and metastasized in onomically advantageous and demanded border regu- more recent years (as, for example, shown by the Ham- lations to stop the flow of Eastern refugees, the threat burg affiliation of some of the 9/11 hijackers). Still, of Soviet military violence, and smugglers. Ultimately, within its self-imposed limits, this is a useful contribu- the West used the border as a self-legitimizing bulwark tion to the study of a difficulty with which most coun- against totalitarianism. In the East, civilian participa- tries in an increasingly globalized world are either cur- tion in the border regime was even more notable. For rently grappling or will find themselves compelled to Sonneberg, Sheffer describes a dynamic relationship address in the near future. between the GDR police apparatus and the population R. M. DOUGLAS that, like the border itself, involved both repression and Colgate University popular participation. The notorious Stasi—the GDR secret police—exerted power through individualized EDITH SHEFFER. Burned Bridge: How East and West controls, manipulating lives in what she calls “the pri- Germans Made the Iron Curtain. Foreword by PETER macy of population politics” (p. 143). But locals also AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2014 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/119/5/1807/44811 by Stanford University Medical Center user on 07 November 2017 1808 Reviews of Books participated in various forms of self-surveillance. None- LAURA HEINS. Nazi Film Melodrama. Urbana and Chi- theless, continued flight across the border exposed the cago: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. viii, 240. weakness and failure of these controls. Cloth $85.00, paper $30.00. The strict enforcement of this border reached a shocking watershed, not with the Berlin Wall’s erection Through substantial chapters on romance, domestic, in 1961, but in 1952 with a campaign the GDR called and home-front melodrama, Laura Heins explores a “Action Vermin” to militarily fortify the border and universal genre in a very particular time and place. Tri- cleanse the frontier of politically unreliable residents. angulated with Nazi film and melodrama are gender In one of the book’s most dramatic and important chap- politics. Drawing out convincing contradictions be- tween theory and practice in Nazi cultural politics, the ters, Sheffer suggests that the 1952 militarization of the author catalogues sometimes surprising themes in these Prohibited Zone may have been the “critical turning films: an absence of weddings; “marriage as a poten- point in German division” (p. 97). Eschewing familiar tially dissolvable, economically defined institution” (p. tropes of totalitarian repression, Sheffer’s nuanced ac- 107); love triangles “narrated from the position of the count reveals how the East German regime’s own weak- rival” (p. 113); the abandonment of family as micro- ness necessitated state reliance on local participation, cosm of a larger social order; or—the objection of a such that border residents contributed to their own cap- male critic in 1941—“the eroticization of non-’Aryan’ tivity. Amid general confusion and bungled execution, women on Third Reich screens” (p. 172). community non-compliance and limited upheaval pre- As a genre term, “melodrama” runs the inherent risk vented deportation of around 60 percent of Sonneberg of being ahistorical. The 12 years of the “Nazi millen- County’s listed targets, many of whom immediately fled nium” (with due linkages to Weimar cinema as precur- westward. Nevertheless, local administrators and sor, and far fewer to any post–World War II continu- “helpers” drew up deportation lists and supervised ities) meaningfully stake out the territory covered here. transports. Generally, “social discipline prevailed” (p. However the comparator throughout, contemporane- 109) to enable the state to transplant 8,369 residents ous Hollywood melodrama, largely remains in parallel overall, 375 from Sonneberg, further inland. No doubt to Nazi melodrama, which blurs a more complex inter- the deportations were coercive, and Sheffer compares play. The book’s subject is a focused instance (Nazi cin- categorization of deportees, including the “work-shy,” ema within German cinema) of the long-standing in- “black-marketeers,” “captialist,” and “asocial,” to terrelationship between Hollywood and European those used by the Nazis. But in practice, the population cinemas more broadly. The opening sentence states: “The Nazi film industry, although the weapon of a re- often viewed the targeting of particular individuals as gime founded on brutal militarism, produced at least arbitrary. Though ultimately a sign of regime weakness, ten times more domestic and romance melodramas this randomness bred greater fear among civilians than war films” (p. 1). But not all the Nazi years were whose paranoid inaction, “cynical conformity” (p. 188), war years, however much the writing was on the wall. or indeed collaboration then lent the state its power. Veit Harlan’s The Great King (1942), ostensibly about Successes and gaffes from this effort became lessons for Frederick the Great and transparently “about” Hitler’s further deportations and division in 1961.