Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain
"Sheffer's meticulous reconstruction of life on the German-German frontier sheds welcome light on broader questions of German history, and on the way human communities create and recreate themselves." --Times Higher Education Supplement"An accessible, intriguing academic study tracking the building of the "wall in the head" between East and West Germany long before the actual construction in 1961." -Kirkus Reviews"The Cold War may have been triggered by the great powers, but Edith Sheffer shows that it was also given shape and reinforced by ordinary people who confronted its political realities every day. Her sensitive biography of a divided German community, ranging across the entire Cold War through reunification, is filled with arresting detail, fresh evidence, and surprises. This book helps us understand not just the trauma of the Cold War but also the many troubles Germans have faced in knitting their fractured nation together after the fall of the Wall in 1989. An outstanding and innovative work." --William I. Hitchcock, University of Virginia"Edith Sheffer's exquisitely nuanced and deeply researched narrative rewrites the history of the division of Germany, revealing an East/West border marked by the infamous Wall but actually constructed over time by postwar violence, Cold War tensions, and above all by the local everyday actions and attitudes of ordinary Germans living with and in both sides of the border."--Atina Grossmann, author ofJews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany"This fascinating micro-history of living with the Iron Curtain traces its divisive social and political impact. Based on exhaustive research, the book explores the local complicity in the construction, maintenance, and subversion of the barrier, illuminates the human dimension of the German division, and explains its lingering post-unification effects."-Konrad Jarausch, author ofAfter Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995"Edith Sheffer provides fascinating glimpses of the ways in which the Wall between East and West Germany was constructed-in every sense-by Germans on the ground, and in turn affected the character of life on either side. Significations of difference, emotional ties, misapprehensions, and mutual hostilities, were a living reality, changing over time and persisting in new ways long after the Wall itself has disappeared." -Mary Fulbrook, author ofDissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships"Edith Sheffer powerfully contributes to dismantling established views on the Cold War. Locals had a constant role in producing the border and, in a bitter irony, neither efforts to evade nor ways of considering the border 'normal' overcame the sense of estrangement among former neighbors." -Alf Lüdtke, University of Erfurt"Lucidly written with plenty of anecdotes...will interest serious history buffs." -Publishers Weekly"Highly recommended." --Choice Magazine