Thirty years after German unification, there is still much to learn about the more than four decades of German division. And at a time when borders have renewed salience, whether to keep out refugees or COVID-19, Astrid Eckert's wonderful new book makes for thought-provoking reading. Although most scholars, including this reviewer, have focused on the impact of the closed inner-German border and the Berlin Wall on the people in East Germany and East Berlin,Footnote ¹ Astrid Eckert examines how the closed border affected West Germany's borderlands and beyond. In clear, engaging prose, she describes how the new border status of towns and communities along the nearly nine-hundred-mile dividing line affected the economy, tourism, and the environment in the newly created Western borderlands, including the area where the author herself was born and raised. As Eckert notes, “This book is … my effort to understand the absurdities with which I grew up, and why I didn't find them absurd then” (11).

Readers should note that the subtitle of the book, Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands, rather overplays how much Eckert discusses culture. A more fitting subtitle for her work would have been Politics, Economics, and the Environment in the Borderlands. Political decisions, political disputes (within West Germany, between West and East Germany, and even between the European Commission [EC] and the Federal Republic of German [FRG]), and their effects occupy a significant part of the book, whether they concerned decisions about economic aid, how the border and the East German regime behind it should be viewed, how to handle environmental issues surrounding the border, or whether, where, and how to construct a nuclear fuel reprocessing and storage site near the border. One senses that Eckert believes that a political focus is old-fashioned and that she instead aims to place her work firmly in the more contemporary fields of environmental studies (asserting that these chapters of her book “constitute the first environmental history of the German Iron Curtain” [4]) and border studies (arguing that “the borderlands constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space” [246]). Yet the contributions she makes in these fields often are based on the extensive research she carried out on political decisions and debates. Thus, Eckert also has much to say about West German politics and the borderlands. By not situating her work within the historiography of West German politics, however, she misses some chances to integrate relevant literature into her study.

This book draws on Eckert's extensive research in local, state, and federal archives from both sides of the former Iron Curtain. The author skillfully deploys these sources not only to create a vivid picture of the Western borderlands during the period of division but also to write across this period, illuminating differences and some continuities in developments in this geographical space both before the border closure in 1952 and after its opening in 1989–1990. In the book's six chapters, Eckert describes the path to the West German designation in 1953 of a special “borderland zone” for federal aid along the entire dividing line; analyzes the economy of the Western borderlands from the mid-1950s through unification and up to the present; surveys tourism along the borderlands; discusses transboundary pollution; portrays the natural landscape along the border; and presents a study of the mostly failed West German plans to create a nuclear reprocessing and waste-storage facility in the border town of Gorleben. The author traces developments from the early postwar period when people felt left behind in the suddenly out-of-the-way borderlands, through the decades of economic support for the zonal borderlands, to the 1980s, when West Berliners set up second homes in some of these same places in search of peace and quiet. She ends with the post-unification period, when the former borderlands struggle again economically while also hosting the Green Belt nature conservation area along the former demarcation line.

Chapter 1 depicts the way the borderland communities banded together to lobby for special federal aid, which they received starting in 1954. These areas faced a triple challenge: they needed to rebuild after the war; they were flooded with refugees from the Soviet zone of Germany/East Germany and expellees from the German territories lost to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union; and the border interrupted their trade patterns with the East and in some cases divided their own factories or industries (such as the Braunschweig coal mining company, whose production facilities were divided by the border [25]), adding further to their economic duress. Although the East Germans only closed the inner-German border in 1952, Eckert argues that the creation of the border actually began with the 1948 currency reform in the western zones of Germany, which introduced the Deutsche mark (DM). This not only “turned the early border into an economic divide” (49), but led to the Soviet blockade of West Berlin.Footnote ² The latter called forth a Western counter-blockade “that dealt the local economies along the demarcation line a crippling blow” (49) because it required them to stop trading across the border. Of course, illicit trade continued as did black market currency exchanges and East–West labor migration, much of which Eckert argues destabilized the area. She calls for research on the Western counter-blockade's impact on the volume of cross-border trade, observing that “the amount of damage caused by the Allied counterblockade to the Western borderland economy has never been quantified or at least estimated, presumably because it was not politically opportune to do so” (272n191).

As the West German economic miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder, took hold in the 1950s, the borderlands saw young people fleeing westward for better opportunities in the Rhineland and Ruhr industrial areas, an image reminiscent of young East Germans moving west for better job and educational opportunities after the opening of the Berlin Wall and German unification.Footnote ³ Initially in the late 1940s, the border communities tried to lobby for aid using economic justifications, but because many other parts of West Germany, including cities destroyed by bombing, also had clear economic need, the border communities ultimately focused on what was unique to them: the impact of the closed border and the Cold War on them. They succeeded in persuading the federal government to designate a forty-kilometer-wide area along the entire inner-German border as “zonal borderlands,” to be transformed into a “show window” of the West to demonstrate the superiority of the Western system to communism and to act as a “magnet” to people from the East (32, 47). As Eckert asserts, this effectively classified nearly 20 percent of West Germany's territory and 12 percent of its population as “a space created by the Cold War” (15) and “adversely affected by the Iron Curtain” (4). In 1954, the federal government established a “special DM 120 million borderland fund, (42), and in 1987 the budget just for cultural and social affairs in the borderlands reached DM 173 million (48). Eckert notes that the post-unification federal investment in the East, Aufbau Ost, was essentially a continuation of this earlier type of aid geared toward equalizing living conditions by helping communities that had suffered because of the division of the country.

Chapter 2 continues the author's examination of the political economy of the borderlands. In 1971, the border communities finally succeed in achieving a status similar to that of West Berlin when the zonal borderland aid law made federal subsidies permanent (61). Yet Eckert points out that no sooner did this aid stabilize than challenges to the special status of the borderlands came from multiple fronts. Willy Brandt's focus on reaching across the border to improve ties with East Germany through Ostpolitik clashed with efforts to highlight border challenges in the West and led to a name change from “zonal borderlands” to “borderlands adjacent to the GDR” (66). In addition, other areas of the West with economic problems of their own wanted federal help and were increasingly vociferous in criticizing the borderland aid. They maintained that the decisions for federal aid should be based on economic criteria and not on location. The city-state of Hamburg felt particularly that it got the wrong end of the stick because most of the areas surrounding it qualified for borderland aid but Hamburg itself did not(69–70). Ultimately, however, challenges from the European Commission beginning in 1979 were what caused the end of borderland aid, albeit not until 1994 (70–72). For five years after that, eastern Germany would receive the highest level of support from EC common tasks funds, which replaced borderland aid (77–78).

Tourism along the border is the subject of chapter 3. Just as regular citizens, tourists, and politicians flocked to observation platforms in West Berlin after 1961 to look over into what many called the death strip, so they traveled to the inner-German border to peer into the East starting in the 1950s. Expellees and refugees came to gaze homeward, but increasing numbers of students, Bundeswehr recruits, Allied soldiers, and German and foreign politicians also visited the border. Regular citizens took Sunday outings to the border, sometimes partying too loudly for the locals and leaving behind garbage and even carving their initials into wooden barriers. Tour bus companies and boat operators along the Elbe benefitted, as did some local shops and inns. Eckert describes borderland postcards that featured Western lookout platforms as well as East German border installations. These contributed to a narrative about the superiority of the Western system, as did brochures and guidebooks, and border visits organized first by the Consortium for an Undivided Germany and then by state and federal agencies (121). This narrative continues to this day to be the dominant one about the years of division.Footnote ⁴ Eckert astutely notes that the “us vs. them” scenario emphasized in trips to the border made many West Germans unprepared for the fall of the Berlin Wall when it came (122).

At times, tourists were not quite sure where the border was and strayed across it, paying for it with their lives in some cases. This led the West to mark the border more clearly, with the result, as Eckert observes, that “border visitors themselves … triggered the changing appearance of the sight they had come to see” (97). All the Western traffic to the border also induced the East German authorities to modify the border so prying Western eyes could not see into the East: they razed whole villages near the border (111–12) and “greened” the border by adding an additional external fence and allowing vegetation to grow around it (121).

With the stabilization of the border area and inner-German relations more generally by the 1980s, people in the West did more than just visit the area; they bought second homes. Eckert highlights the three thousand West Berliners who had second homes in Lüchow-Dannenberg county along the Elbe. They play a prominent role in the chapter on the planned nuclear reprocessing and storage facility in Gorleben.

Throughout the book, Eckert gives life to the observation of German historian Thomas Lindenberger “that Cold War Germany was politically ‘divided, but not disconnected.’”Footnote ⁵ The chapter on air and water pollution makes this particularly clear, as does the fact that most rivers in Germany flow from east to west. Eckert argues that the increasing pollution in the east (and its spread to the west) was one key sign of the dire condition of the German Democratic Republic's (GDR's) economy (129). West Germany paid for East German pollution—in more ways than one. Not only did the FRG suffer from polluted air that caused horses’ nostrils “to show signs of chemical burn” from sulfur dioxide (143) and polluted rivers that killed fish (such as the Werra River, polluted by potash mines in Thuringia, with the pollution reaching as far downstream as the Weser River in Bremen [133–36]), but West Germany ultimately paid to build or renovate East German factories and power plants to be more environmentally friendly. This included modernizing three water plants in East Berlin so that West Berliners could also have clean(er) water, investing in GDR power plants to improve the air quality in West Berlin, and investing in sewage plants and paper, chemical, and pharmaceutical factories near the border in East Germany (132, 151–52).

In inner-German negotiations on environmental issues, GDR leaders quickly realized that they could use these issues to get hard currency and aid from the FRG. For years, the FRG tried to get the GDR to invest in pollution-reduction measures, but instead the GDR held out successfully for West German financial and technical aid to do this. As Eckert observes, “Any issues West German negotiators wanted to discuss were appraised according to their cash value for East Germany”; West Germans noted a “pattern of extortion” in the East German approach, which viewed “West German interest in environmental protection … [as] a possible new income stream” (151, 154). The author misses a chance here to point out that the East German leaders followed the same strategy in the environmental arena as they did with many other West German priorities so as to cash in while giving the FRG (some of) what it wanted: the freeing of political prisoners and their release to the West via Freikauf; the upkeep of the transit routes between West Germany and West Berlin; the condition of telephone communications between East and West; special interest-free credits; and the setting of a minimal (yet ever-increasing and artificially enhanced) exchange rate for Western visitors to the East.Footnote ⁶ All of these policies, as well as those discussed by Eckert, raise the issue of whether the East German economy might have collapsed sooner if it had not been for all the Western aid.

Lest the reader think all the pollution came from the eastern side of the border, Eckert makes clear that Western industries also caused pollution of their own, although it was never as bad as what was produced in the East. The Werra River remains extremely polluted to this day and is in fact the river with the highest salinity levels in Europe. Since unification, Germany has invested heavily in cleaning up the environment in the former East, starting with the July 1, 1990, Environmental Union, which “extended West German environmental law to East Germany and sought to create comparable environmental conditions in the new federal states by the year 2000” (155).

Chapter 5 examines what Eckert calls “transboundary natures”: the way the landscape along the border “transcended a politically and socially constructed barrier” (161). The relatively little foot traffic on the actual border attracted breeding birds and other flora and fauna, such as in the Drömling wetlands and in Coburg County in Upper Franconia. Eckert recounts a story of border guards on both sides of the border cooperating to protect breeding birds and writes about “the sloping sides of the anti-vehicular ditches [which] provided ideal nesting grounds” for some birds. In addition, “the metal fence and border poles were the perfect height for song posts and perching” (165).

Of course, the inner-German border, especially the minefields, killed or maimed many animals as well, including deer, wild boar, hares, and foxes, to say nothing of people (166–67). Eckert counters the impression that only communists were killing animals by noting that far more animals were killed by West Germans driving their cars (166). She also describes the ways the East German border soldiers tried to reduce the wildlife carnage by adding a fence to keep animals out of the area with mines: “The construction of double metal fences in the second half of the 1960s … enclosed the minefields, making them inaccessible to deer” (167).

West Germany regularly proposed the creation of transborder nature preserves, which the GDR always rejected, although the 1987 environmental accords signed by the two states included a working group on nature conservation as well as others on dying forests, air pollution, and related topics. As the East German economy came under increasing pressure in the 1980s, the authorities took to harvesting “the more or less untapped wood reservoir in the border area,” which they had let stand to keep prying Western eyes from seeing in. Instead, in places such as the district of Suhl, “army conscripts … received chainsaw training and were sent off into the woods” (182).

The opening of the inner-German border and the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, saw many of the former border areas overrun with people and cars. A month later, conservationists from both sides of the border proposed creating a Green Belt to preserve the biotope, including various endangered species. In 1990, the East Germans rushed to protect a variety of natural areas in a new national park program passed two days before unification (192). Both along the inner-German border and in Berlin, those seeking to preserve parts of the border, whether for nature conservation or as a memorial or both, faced an uphill battle against those who wanted to remove all signs of the deadly border and use the land in other ways. Just as it took years to build a consensus in Berlin to preserve parts of the former Berlin Wall for history, so it took years to gain support for the Green Belt.Footnote ⁷

A year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West German filmmaker and conservationist Heinz Sielmann had suggested that “the landscapes along the border … would make a tantalizing transboundary conservation project between the two German states. A national park stretching from the Baltic to the Thuringian Forest would be the most fitting monument to German unity once the border was overcome” (175), he said. A decade after Seilmann's suggestion, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's red/green government came to power in 1998 and supported the Green Belt project. In 2005, the government finally “declared the Green Belt to be part of Germany's ‘national nature heritage’” (196–97).Footnote ⁸ The city of Berlin had created a nature trail four years earlier along much of the former path of the Berlin Wall, as proposed by Michael Cramer, a member of Berlin's municipal parliament representing the Greens.Footnote ⁹

The final chapter of Eckert's book is a study of the controversy surrounding the federal government's 1977 decision (later partially retracted) to construct a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant and nuclear-waste storage facility in the border town of Gorleben in Lüchow-Dannenberg County. This fascinating chapter ties together historical developments in the nuclear fuel industry, West German federal, state, and local politics, the antinuclear movement, GDR politics and the Stasi, and inner-German ties. The author relies on a treasure trove of documents from both West and East Germany: a Bundestag investigative committee from 2010–2013, and Stasi records related to top secret West German meetings about nuclear policy, including the construction of the facility at Gorleben and how to negotiate with the GDR about it in the hopes of dampening East German objections.

In early 1977, the governor of the state of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht (CDU), proposed that Gorleben be chosen as the site for the massive new facility that would bring billions of Deutsch Marks, jobs, people, and perks to his state (201, 203). Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (Social Democratic Party) overcame his numerous objections and agreed to the proposal a few months later. Scientists argued that other sites would be safer, and Schmidt also had “strong reservations about placing advanced nuclear technology and weapons-grade plutonium” produced during the reprocessing of nuclear fuel just three kilometers from the border with the GDR, “where it could be exposed to surprise attacks by Warsaw Pact troops or fall into the hands of terrorists” (212). Before Schmidt's agreement, Albrecht urged him to consult with the GDR about the plans for the site, believing the site—including the salt domes where the nuclear waste would be stored—would be safe for people on both sides of the border.

The Stasi had been closely following the FRG debates on nuclear energy and where to site the new facility. They even seemed to have a mole in the top West German decision-making body, the “‘nuclear cabinet,’ an interministerial group in Bonn concerned with the peaceful use of nuclear energy” (216). Thus, when the time came for inner-German discussions about the site, the GDR could use secret information about “the objections that Bonn anticipated from East Berlin, which, transposed into a GDR document, now read like a blueprint on how to aggravate the Schmidt administration the most” (215). The Stasi also had informers in the Gorleben area and in the broader West German antinuclear movement.

Although the GDR objected to the West German plans, it was constrained by how loudly it could complain without drawing attention to safety issues concerning its own nuclear-waste repository in a former salt mine on the border at Morsleben. In the end, it was not so much GDR objections that killed most of the plans for Gorleben as two other factors: changes in the understanding about best practices for reprocessing nuclear fuel and storing nuclear waste and the highly publicized protests by antinuclear activists at the site and throughout West Germany. In 1979, Governor Albrecht withdrew his support for locating any nuclear reprocessing facility in Gorleben, forcing the federal government to scale back its plans for the site to just a nuclear-waste storage facility.

Ultimately, the protests as well as new safety data compiled by scientists led to a decision to store the nuclear waste not in the salt dome as initially planned (because radiation could leak out), but above ground. In 1982 and 1983, protesters even crossed the demarcation line into the GDR, thus staging antinuclear demonstrations on GDR territory without being stopped by the border soldiers (235–38). The legacy of the Gorleben protests and the broader antinuclear movement has been significant in post-unification Germany. Once nuclear waste began to arrive at Gorleben in 1995, protests resumed (239). In 1998, Schröder's government announced a phase-out of all nuclear energy, and in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed that Germany would cease all nuclear energy production by 2022 (240).

Astrid Eckert's wide-ranging, vividly written book makes two significant contributions to the literature on contemporary German history: she illuminates the impact of the Cold War border on “the East of the West,” as I have described here, and more broadly, she demonstrates that neither 1945 nor 1990 was a Stunde Null. She outlines multiple instances during the period of German division where issues concerning pollution, spatial planning, economic development, tourism, and migration had begun in the previous period or continued (or reemerged) in the subsequent period. Thus, in this work, Eckert nicely fits the period of division into a broader sweep of German history.