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AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE IRON CURTAIN
my advert on the border guard website for information about the former
militarised border as he has always found it interesting. He explains how
visits to Bratislava in 1984 and East Berlin in 1987 gave him an insight to
the “bleak everyday life in the Eastern Bloc” (Michael 2011 pers. comm. 10 th
January). He continues to explain the effects this had on him: “This of
course left a particular threatening impression on me, but then also
certainly some form of fascination, when standing only a few hundred
metres away from the fences, the watchtowers and the foot patrols”
(Michael 2011 pers. comm. 10 th January). In 2008 when Schengen had been
extended and the borders of many of the former Eastern countries were
open he decided to investigate these areas that had tickled his imagination
for such a long time. During weekends and holidays he started walking
along the paths following the former fence line to investigate what remained
of the border guards. He found small sections of the former fencing at
Čižov, at Navary in South Bohemia, Czech Republic, and along a cycle path
between Breclav and Potok, near the tripoint of Austrian, Slovakia and
Czech Republic. He came across many border guard stations in different
stages of ruin. Some have been reused, one even as a brothel, whilst the
majority of the sites have been left to deteriorate (Michael 2011 pers. comm.
10 th January).
At the National Record in Kew Garden, London I find a story told by a
South African woman feeling powerless to help her husband held in
captivity by the government on the other side of the border. From the
Austrian side she is trying to make the diplomats of the West understand
the disastrous results a national border can have. In her letter she writes
about her husband who left Czechoslovakia in 1969 because of the political
situation and settled down in South Africa. Whilst in Austria in 1972 he
went to the border near the town of Mikulov in order to wave to his parents
whom he had not seen since he left three years earlier. The wife is
suggesting that the phones must have been bugged when arrangements
were made with the parents as there were several soldiers at the ready when
he turned up. Although he stayed within Austrian territory he was shot and
dragged by force over the border. She recalls the event:
On the road left of my car I noticed a cap belonging to one of the
frontier police lying on the ground. Immediately afterwards I heard one
single gunshot and then a series of gunshots as if from a machine gun.
By this time I had reached the bridge which spans the small canal which
is the border and I looked over to the left to see two or perhaps three
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