The Iron Curtain
behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe mr gorbachoff teared down this wall [Music] [Applause] [Music] heat heat [Music] heat heat [Music] heat heat [Music] [Applause] [Music] heat [Music] [Applause] heat [Music] heat heat [Music]
The “Iron Curtain” was a symbolic and physical boundary that divided Europe into two separate areas during the Cold War (1945-1991). It represented the ideological and political divide between the communist countries of Eastern Europe, aligned with the Soviet Union, and the capitalist democracies of Western Europe. The term, popularized by Winston Churchill, signified the Soviet Union’s attempt to isolate itself and its satellite states from the West.
The Iron Curtain included fortified borders, barbed wire, watchtowers, and restrictions on movement between East and West. The Curtain stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea, separating countries like Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria from Western Europe. Sadly, The Curtain led to a significant decline in East-West trade and economic hardship in Eastern Bloc countries.
The fall of the Iron Curtain began with political changes in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, marked a pivotal moment in the collapse of the Iron Curtain, signifying the end of physical division between East and West.
While The Wall has been removed throughout Germany, there are places (besides Berlin) where the wall was kept in place as an outdoor museum. For example, you may visit the town of Mödlareuth, where The Wall cut the tiny town in half. Families and friends were completely cut off from each other. Another site is located on the edge of Hötensleben, where you can hike a hill inside the “kill zone” and really get a sense of what it might have been like to live during those dark days. We visited both Mödlareuth and Hötensleben and have featured both sites in this video.
Our exploration of The Wall was inspired by a stop at a rest area near Marienborn. The Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing was the largest and most important border crossing on the Inner German border during the division of Germany. Due to its geographical location, allowing for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin, most transit traffic to and from West Berlin used the Helmstedt-Marienborn crossing. Most travel routes from West Germany to East Germany and Poland also used this crossing. The border crossing existed from 1945 to 1990.