Iron Curtain leaves a green mark
The Ireland of my youth was so anti-Communist that I resolved to visit the Workers’ Paradise. It was easier said than done in the early ’60s but, somehow, I got visas to cross what Winston Churchill, borrowing a phrase of Joseph Goebbels, called the Iron Curtain. This massive barrier stretched from the Norwegian-Russian border in the Arctic to the Turkish-Bulgarian frontier on the shores of the Black Sea. The 1,393km-long German section was particularly formidable.
It took several hours for this gob-smacked Irish student to get through a crossing-point to the German Democratic Republic. The atmosphere there was paranoid. Photos of Walter Ulbricht, the GDR supremo, which one saw everywhere, caught the anxious mood. I befriended some off-duty guards in a pub. Their job was to man the machine-gun towers along the curtain. They claimed to believe in what they were doing, but I wondered what they really thought. No criticism of the regime was possible; it was risky for them even to talk to a Westerner. One guard, however, was quite forthcoming. He hailed from Wittenberg, scene of Luther’s revolt, and our discussion inevitably turned to religion and ideology. Border guards, he told me, never served close to home; security personnel must have no ties in the locality.
