Astrid M. Eckert, Associate Professor of History, published West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands with Oxford University Press in October 2019. Frank Biess (University of California, San Diego) offers the following review of the work: “This brilliant book is a timely reminder of how borders and walls remake the human and natural environments they seek to divide. Deeply researched and deftly written, West Germany and the Iron Curtain is a major accomplishment that is certain to have a lasting impact on the field.”

Below, Dr. Eckert offers a glimpse into the making of the monograph as a part of the History Department’s series on new faculty publications.

Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense of the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.

This book took me eleven years. Of course that does not mean that I engaged with the project every waking hour over those years. There were times of intense immersion during the summers and during occasional leave time; and then there were times when my attention was needed elsewhere and the book project moved to the back burner for a while. What I try to convey to our students is that you really need to be passionate about your dissertation and book project. Given the time such projects take, without a deep commitment and this passion, you would run out of steam. You also need to pace yourself and break down the project into manageable portions. Finally, it helps to remember that everything always takes longer than you think! The production process holds many surprises, from copyright issues for images to staff changes at the publisher’s offices.

What was the research process like?

I visited nineteen archives with records of state and non-state actors. I interviewed a number of people, mostly nature conservationists, and corresponded with a few former East German border guards. At times, I identified relevant interlocutors in the archives or in dated literature from, say, the 1970s and ’80s. In one case, I read an article from 1981 on the re-discovery of the black stork (ciconia nigra) in a certain area of Thuringia (East Germany). Although the piece was very vague on location, I figured out that it must have been close to the Iron Curtain. I contacted the author, and lo and behold, I uncovered the story of how this East German conservationist was called by GDR border guards who had observed a “strange black bird with red feet” in the border area. This might not rock everyone’s boat, but if you are trying to piece together how, exactly, the “hardware” of the Iron Curtain that was placed into the landscape affected wildlife, you live for nuggets like this. In terms of reading, I extended my reach into fields like conservation biology, ornithology, and river ecology. I also read up on nuclear technology for the chapter on a nuclear waste reprocessing and storage facility that the West Germans intended to build right on the Iron Curtain. This obviously does not turn me into a nuclear engineer, but I felt strongly that you need to know the difference between a light-water reactor and a fast breeder, otherwise you can’t explain what’s at stake.

Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?

I love them all because each offers a new perspective on a subject in Cold War German history that many people would have considered to be “settled.” The chapter on tourism to the Iron Curtain has autobiographical roots of sorts. As a high school student, I myself took our French exchange students to the border although I no longer remember why we did this or what they thought about it; presumably it was one of the few things we could do in our rural region that might impress teenagers from Paris. I also like the chapter on transboundary pollution between East and West Germany. Not only is this a staple subject in environmental history and borderland studies, it also allowed me to develop a genuinely new perspective on inter-German relations. Environmental diplomacy has thus far been overlooked in those relations. I point out that the inter-German border was the interface through which West and East Germany encountered each other’s pollution, an encounter that was becoming very asymmetrical over time: during the 1980s the GDR’s infrastructure was in full decline and its decaying industry was literally “bleeding” pollution. West German authorities monitored and engaged East German pollution. I argue that through the evidence of this pollution (the water quality of the Elbe River was so poor that a new classification category had to be invented to describe its pollution level), they were practically handed the evidence of the GDR’s dissolution on a platter but failed to get the message. Still, the negotiations with the GDR over pollution that I address in the chapter generated the knowledge about the causes of East German environmental problems. Only if we take these encounters seriously (although some of them may have looked ineffectual at the time) can we understand the rapid pace of the post-unification ecological restoration in East Germany. To be sure, much of the pollution abatement after 1990 was achieved by switching off the polluter—factories were closed, mines were shut down etc., but I still credit the environmental diplomacy of the 1980s with producing a clear understanding of the challenges and occasionally with generating accurate templates to fix them. Such insight is only possible, of course, if one does not stop analyzing data in 1990 when both countries re-unified. In fact, I found it very illuminating and satisfactory to draw the subject matter of all my chapters well into the post-unification years and at times right into the present.

How does this project align with your broad research agenda?

With its strong focus on environmental history, work on this book has acquainted me with several aspects of this field, namely the history of nature conservation, the history of pollution and environmentalism, and nuclear history. I intend to continue to work in this field with a new project that examines the ways in which one leading industrialized western economy with a high standard of living has related to global environmental resources over time. This new project will probe Germany’s reputation as a “green leader” and presumably show that the paths towards climate-conscious and sustainable practices that it took were serendipitous, contingent, and involved dead ends and unintended consequences.

Assistant Professor Carl Suddler was recently interviewed by Rose Scott, host of the WABE (one of Atlanta’s NPR affiliates) show “Closer Look.” Suddler discussed his new book, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU Press, 2019). Listen to the full show, “Closer Look: The History of Black Youth & The Criminal Justice System,” and check out the recent new faculty profile of Dr. Suddler.

Assistant Professor of History Dr. Carl Suddler was recently interviewed by Diverse Issues in Higher Education about his new book, Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York. New York University Press published the book earlier this year. Lamont Jones wrote the piece for Diverse, entitled “Emory History Professor’s New Book Probes Black Youth, Criminal Justice.” Read an excerpt below, in which Suddler discusses the book’s cover photo, along with the full article here.

What’s the story behind that compelling cover photo?

[Suddler] “I love the cover image for several reasons. It’s a photo from 1966 Brooklyn. The patrolmen in the backdrop are amongst the 1,500 that were assigned to the neighborhood and, what I often like to point out, is the ‘diversity’ amongst the ranks. There is no information related to the ages of the boys in the image, but you can gather that they are all relatively young, especially the youngster peering out into the camera from the hole in the fence. At its core, however, I feel this image captures the crux of the book – and the heart of the problem today – and that is how normal the over-policing of Black and Brown communities has become. The boys continue to play ball; the officers continue to stand pat. Their proximity does not appear to phase the youngsters. However, we all know too well that increased interactions with the police often lead to increased arrest rates, arrest rates dictate ‘crime’ statistics, and as a country – because we have yet to figure out a better alternative – we rely on crime statistics to make sense of who is ‘presumed criminal.’ Whether or not they committed a crime becomes moot.”

Assistant Professor Carl Suddler recently wrote a piece in The Washington Post commenting on the Netflix miniseries “When They See Us,” which chronicles the story of five teenagers — the so-called Central Park Five — forced to confess to a rape they did not commit in 1989. Suddler is the author of Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York, to be published by NYU press in July of 2019. Read the full piece, “How the Central Park Five expose the fundamental injustice in our legal system,” along with the excerpt below.

“When They See Us” sheds new light on this old tale and aims to create change. DuVernay’s miniseries joins the decades-long efforts by activists to humanize the Central Park Five beyond the numeric moniker. It also, perhaps most notably, has inspired the next generation of social justice activists committed to working to overturn wrongful convictions and to reigniting mainstream discussions about criminal injustices in America’s legal system, in the hope of achieving an overhaul of the system.

NPR’s Michel Martin, host of “All Things Considered,” recently interviewed Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt about the resurgence of public antisemitism in the contemporary United States. Lipstadt is, most recently, the author of Antisemitism: Here And Now (Schocken, 2019). At Emory she holds positions as Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and as associated faculty in the History Department. Read the full transcript of the interview here.