Conditions: ruins of the Cold War -- Cornerstones: iconoclasm and the making of the prayer wall -- Infrastructure: civilian border travel and travelogues -- Uses: visual nostalgia at the prayer wall -- Epilogue: tragic frames
Summary
The Iron Curtain did not exist. Instead, it comprised multiple regional segments, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. The first cultural studies account of the border's landscape, 'The Icon Curtain' straddles the Bohemian Forest to uncover a far-reaching genealogy of one such section and debunk the stereotype of the unprecedented mid-twentieth-century partition. There, between the 1950s and 1980s, West German locals and Sudeten German expellee newcomers shaped a civilian rampart, the 'prayer wall'
