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Title details for Retracing the Iron Curtain by Timothy Phillips - Available

Retracing the Iron Curtain

A 3,000-Mile Journey Through the End and Afterlife of the Cold War

by Timothy Phillips
Gerard McCarthy
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
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2 of 2 copies available
Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of WWII, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. It divided Europe from north to south for forty-five years. Crossing it in either direction was always a political act; in many cases, it was a crime to even talk about doing so. New generations have grown up since these borders came down, freed from the restrictions of the Cold War era. But what has the Iron Curtain left in its wake?
Timothy Phillips travels its full 3,000-mile route to craft this new people's history of a defining twentieth-century conflict. Here, in the borderlands where a powerful clash of civilizations took form in concrete and barbed wire, he uncovers the remarkable stories of everyday people forever imprinted by life in the Curtain's shadow.
Some look back on the era with nostalgia, even affection, while others despise it, unable to forgive the decades of hardship their families and nations endured. A director recalls the night his movie premiered in East Germany—the very night the Berlin Wall fell. And a railroad worker recounts the hijacking of a passenger train from Czechoslovakia that breached the Curtain, granting those aboard immediate asylum in the West. These narratives, by turns harrowing and heartening, paint a vivid portrait of the new Europe that emerged from the ruins.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 18, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798350812879
      • File size: 395820 KB
      • Duration: 13:44:37

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 19, 2022
      In this soulful report on the legacy of the Cold War, BBC News contributor Phillips (The Secret Twenties) recounts his 2019 trip along the length of the former Iron Curtain, from the “scrubland and dunes” of Norway to the “landlocked enclave” of Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan. Along the way, Phillips reflects on numerous ideological and militaristic clashes that occurred in these borderlands, such as the June 1968 arrival of nearly 300 Soviet tanks at the border with Norway, a move meant to protest the country’s “active participation in NATO.” (Norway’s leaders were caught by surprise, Phillips writes, and “did nothing to publicize what was happening.”) He also interviews pensioners longing for Soviet times (“We were more humane. We drank together. Chatted. Danced. Sang songs. We lived better,” remembers one Latvian woman about her childhood in a Siberian city) and young people trying to forge a future. A keen observer, Phillips finds that “the legacy of communism lingers” in places like Vyborg, Russia, where a statue of Lenin still stands in the main square “silently hectoring passersby”; amid scenes of “conspicuous consumption” in Bratislava, Slovakia, he notices graffiti honoring a journalist whose 2018 killing helped spark a reform movement. Knowledgeable and engrossing, this is an illuminating portrait of post-communist life. Photos.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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