East-West Flow Grows : The Curtain Is Falling on Iron Curtain

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

--Winston Churchill, 1946

With a quiet pride, Mayor Zoltan Vincze unfolded a blueprint that sketched his vision: the planned leisure center, the shopping mall and the proposed highway interchange at the edge of his sleepy frontier village.

“It will change life,” conceded Vincze, a 39-year-old agricultural engineer. “But this is our future.”

Three miles west, across the potato fields and grazing land, Vincze’s counterpart in the Austrian border community of Nickelsdorf has a similar vision.

Population Halved

He believes that the $44-million hotel-symposium-shopping complex and cultural center he hopes to see built nearby will stem a decline that has nearly halved the village’s population since World War II.

“It’s going to bring our people back,” Mayor Gerhard Jocham said confidently.

Four decades after the Cold War cut through this land, leaving the two villages isolated on the edge of their respective worlds, a new era unfolds--one likely to place them at a crossroads.

The mines, the trip wires and the dog patrols are gone from the fields now. In May, the first of the electrified border fencing came down.

It is the beginning of the end for the Iron Curtain.

While Europe’s East-West divide still splits towns and families along much of its length and those who try to cross in many areas still risk death, events in this quiet borderland reflect a larger mending of contacts all across a divided

Europe, a mending that runs from reunited families to hustling business opportunities to high-tech communication.

From day-trippers and dental patients to investment bankers and strawberry pickers, from TV shows to faxed news releases and humanitarian aid, the East-West flow of people, goods and ideas today is greater, and growing faster, than at any time since World War II consumed Europe half a century ago.

Although the spotlight has focused on the breathtaking pace of change in Hungary and Poland, there is also movement in hard-line Communist states such as East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The number of working-age East Germans traveling to the West has risen from 60,000 to 1.2 million in three years, and the Czech regime in January eased hard-currency restrictions for its citizens, long a major barrier to travel in the West.

But both countries maintain heavily fortified borders with the West, a reminder of how distant a fully open Europe remains.

At a time when West Germany-based reporters can use a fax to receive politically sensitive material from Poland, Romanians smuggle cryptic messages in stuffed dolls.

But the tide of events is running against Stalinist-style hard-line regimes.

Some examples:

-- In the large Hungarian market town of Sopron, a talented Hungarian dentist named Laszlo Szilagyi runs a brisk practice almost exclusively composed of Western patients, who come from as far as Italy and Switzerland because the work is good and the price is right--roughly one-third of that at home. “Our reputation is spreading,” Szilagyi said. “We’ve had 23 new patients in the last two weeks.”

-- When Pope John Paul II celebrated open-air Mass in two Austrian villages near the Hungarian and Yugoslav borders last summer, about 150,000 East Europeans crossed the frontier to celebrate the occasion.

-- Outside St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Munich, an informal labor exchange operates on most weekends, offering jobs mainly to Polish nationals willing to take on part-time work to help finance vacations in the West.

-- About 1.5 million Poles now work temporarily in Western Europe, planting the bulbs for Holland’s tulip festival, harvesting hops and strawberries in Bavaria and cleaning homes in London.

-- Elsewhere, West German real estate agents now carry Polish farmland on their books for investment leasing, and advertisements in Budapest newspapers offer free transportation to lure Hungarians to huge new- and used-car markets in Munich.

-- Run-down Polish castles have become hot-ticket investment items for West Europeans wanting to convert them into luxury hotels for Western tourists, and Tamas Beck, Hungary’s minister of trade, recently toured West Germany carrying a list of about 100 financially strapped, state-owned companies that he was reportedly prepared to sell.

Beyond these events, a far deeper process of reconciliation is under way to re-bind the severed ties.

Margareta Heinrich, an Austrian local government office worker in the wine-growing town of Gols, was forced to wait 23 years before she could meet her aunt, who lived barely 13 miles away in Hungary. Now, they visit nearly every weekend.

In a region united for much of its existence, hers is a common story.

Along the border this year, Austrian and Hungarian village soccer, judo and table tennis teams have resumed competing against each other for the first time since the war period.

“I see a new life for our region,” said Rudolf Suchy, who was born and raised in Zurndorf and now commutes to Vienna for work. “From here to Bratislava (Czechoslovakia), to Mosonmagyarovar (Hungary) we were one area, one culture with one history.

“Liberalization in Czechoslovakia is coming,” he added with confidence. “Things are developing fast.”

Hungarian schoolboys explore Austrian border villages on day trips by bicycle. In taverns along both sides of the border, residents talk of doing away with passports altogether in the border region. Before long, they say, they may move freely around a 5-to-10-mile area on either side using only a special residence paper.

Business across the border also booms.

Nickelsdorf, population 1,650, now counts 28 shops selling consumer durables--mainly television sets, videotape recorders and stereo equipment--to Hungarian day-trippers.

“Two for us, 26 for the Hungarians,” summed up Mayor Jocham. “People are getting rich.”

One electric shop in Gols now routinely makes customer service calls in Hungary. Austrian women cross the border to get their hair styled in Hungarian salons. Hungarian bakers produce two daily batches: one for local tastes, another for Austrian visitors.

The implications of these changes are considerable--and not all are positive.

Although the threat of superpower confrontation has eased, the mixture of Eastern Europe’s powerful new political forces with its precarious economic condition is judged by many to be a potentially volatile brew.

The large numbers of immigrants suddenly allowed to resettle from Eastern Europe into West Germany have generated their own strains and disturbing political trends in that country.

West German authorities expect about 300,000 of them this year.

Reunification Issue

Any major rapprochement across the European divide will eventually raise anew the question of German reunification--an emotional, delicate problem with no ready answer.

There are also more subtle developments, such as the potential reawakening of the amorphous idea of “Mitteleuropa”--a loose sense of common identity among the cultures of central Europe that influenced political thought during the last half of the 19th Century.

But for those living farther north along Europe’s political divide, such questions remain premature.

The mines and automatic firing devices may have been quietly removed from the border that splits Germany, but along a 500-yard-wide strip running more than 1,000 miles through central Europe, the threat of death still separates East from West.

About 75 miles northwest of Nuremberg, the border remains as impregnable as ever, dividing about 20 houses of the farming village of Moedlareuth just as it has since the early 1950s.

Beyond the 10-foot-high wall, the barbed wire, and nearby watchtower, those in the western half of the village can just see the roof of their old schoolhouse, the guest house and the seven homes that fate condemned to the eastern side of the divided Europe.

How It All Began

Local residents recall how the curtain descended: first there was a guarded strip, then came restrictions on planting and working nearby fields. Finally, the village was simply cut in half.

“One day, there was no more school,” recalled Moedlareuth farmer Manfried Zeh, now 50. “We weren’t allowed across.”

That was 1952.

Since that day, a generation has grown up within sight of each other, yet worlds apart, able to see, but unable to talk or even wave to each other.

Retired farmer Max Goller can stand on his doorstep and watch his brother Kurt in the east fetch his morning paper and bottle of milk every day, but greetings are discouraged by East German guards manning the nearby watchtower.

There is no sense of a changing Europe here--only a powerful mood of being at the end of the line.

In a village with no through traffic, little optimism and only one child, there is little talk of the future.

There is only resignation.

Few there believe they will live to see their community reunified.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about that border,” said Zeh. “Maybe there will be a time when we can say ‘good day,’ but I don’t see that wall coming down.”

On the East German side of this frontier, in the small Elbe River town of Doemitz, 100 miles southeast of Hamburg, the quarter-mile depth of the border fortifications cuts the river from a town that once depended on its port to exist.

With its port now gone, Doemitz lives off a local electronics component plant, factories for making gardening and sporting equipment and a wood-processing operation, all placed there by the Communist authorities after the war.

In the town’s picturesque cobblestoned square, citizens insist that this is somehow natural.

“We don’t miss the river,” claimed 27-year-old machinist Michael Starrck. “The border has been there too long to grieve about now.”

Party officials in the town squirm uncomfortably at the thought of a change.

“We don’t think about this possibility,” said the town’s youthful mayor, Torstein Rudolf. “It hasn’t been discussed.”

Those who patrol the inner-German frontier say tensions have eased, but only slightly.

“Two years ago, you wouldn’t even get eye contact; then there was a grudging recognition,” said West German Border Police officer Joachim Doerig of his East German counterparts who often pass within a few yards. “Now, we talk about the weather or gardening.”

In the months after World War II, the Iron Curtain descended across Europe quietly, almost invisibly at first, in the form of transit restrictions in and out of Soviet-occupied Europe.

Dubbed ‘Death Strip’

In many places a simple, 30-foot-wide plowed line eventually followed. It was dubbed the “death strip,” but it was Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill who named it the Iron Curtain in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Mo.

Although sentries patrolled its length, it was hardly impenetrable at first.

East German math teacher Wolfgang Nowe recalled how residents in Doemitz would occasionally swim the Elbe to spend a few hours in the West after bribing a Russian sentry with a drop of schnapps.

“You’d give him a few belts, and he’d even watch your clothes for you,” said Nowe.

Over the years, the “death strip” widened. Electrified barbed wire was added, watch towers erected and mines laid.

Exclusion zones ranging from 3 to 15 miles back from the frontier were established in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, excluding all but authorized individuals and, in many cases, isolating border communities.

Communities Fenced In

Many East German border communities are completely fenced.

In the early 1970s, the East Germans added automatic firing devices that sprayed shrapnel at anyone who had successfully traversed the mines to reach the perimeter fencing.

Since 1961, 200 people are known to have died trying to cross the inner German frontier alone. Sixteen have died in the last 30 months. Many times that number managed to escape by means that stretched the bounds of human ingenuity.

They have jumped, swum, run, burrowed and flown to freedom in makeshift aircraft, homemade chairlifts and armored cars. They have hidden themselves under the hoods of automobiles and inside telephone cable drums.

One family floated across the Czech-West German border in a homemade balloon. A young West German smuggled his petite East German fiancee to the West in a suitcase.

Gradually, fortifications along the borders have diminished.

The mines along the Austro-Hungarian border were removed in the 1970s. More recently, East Germany took out its mines and automatic firing devices, relying instead on early warning trip wires, watch towers, free-roaming dogs and armed patrols.

Deceptively Benign

Along much of its length, the Iron Curtain today looks deceptively benign. Fencing is often either concealed by trees or, as along the Czech border, set far back from the frontier, out of view.

Near the West German town of Lichtenberg, the border posts flank a small stream at the bottom of a hill. The dogs, the fences and the watchtowers lie behind the hill.

Only in walled areas such as West Berlin or Moedlareuth does Europe’s scar show its full ugliness.

But even these barriers are unable to stop the greatest force of all for change: ideas, carried across the divide on a bewildering assortment of radio and television air waves.

For many, it is a gathering force that will eventually sweep away the remaining physical barriers.

The flow of ideas began visibly seeping through in the late 1960s as East Germans surreptitiously equipped their TV sets to receive West German programs.

Reluctantly supporting what they couldn’t stop, East German authorities eventually promoted the Western programming as a kind of national tranquilizer that converted potential street activists into couch potatoes.

They even cabled West German programming into an area near Dresden known as “the valley of the dumb” because topography made reception poor.

Today, virtually throughout Eastern Europe, television makes it hard to block at least the whiffs of new ideas from the outside.

But the real onslaught of ideas passing across the European divide has come via radio.

Carefully tailored short-wave programming by organizations such as the British Broadcasting Corp., the Voice of America and the Munich-based Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty target East Bloc audiences in their own languages.

Flood of Information

With the gradual cessation of jamming over the last two years, an unprecedented flood of information now cascades from West to East.

According to BBC figures, between 70% and 90% of adult East Europeans now tune in at least once a week to a Western radio station.

The flow goes both ways.

At Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where cumulative listener response over its first 30 years of transmitting had been limited to a few hundred letters, mailbags now bulge and about 50,000 telephone calls from East Bloc listeners have been handled during the last seven months.

During the recent Polish election campaign, the Solidarity organization regularly faxed copies of its daily newspaper to Radio Free Europe, which promptly broadcast stories back to the station’s estimated 11 million Polish listeners.

In a similar vein, when Soviet authorities confiscated an issue of a Tblisi newspaper containing a graphic account of the army’s crackdown against demonstrators in that Georgian city, Radio Liberty reporters called the editor, got the account, then broadcast it repeatedly to the station’s listeners.

‘Act as a Megaphone’

“We act as a megaphone,” summed up Eugene Pell, president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

As countries such as Poland, Hungary and even the Soviet Union begin to liberalize, hard-line regimes find themselves increasingly isolated, fighting on new fronts to keep the lid on.

As barriers crumble elsewhere, Romania’s aging despot Nicolae Ceausescu erects a new barricade, fencing his country’s northern border against the fast-unfolding changes in neighboring Hungary.

The move may one day saddle Romania with a problem that liberalization has brought Hungarian authorities.

They have found that such formidable barriers as the Iron Curtain don’t come down easily, and there are reportedly arguments within the government over who should pay bill.

Near Hegyeshalom, about 2 1/2 miles of fencing have gone so far, but progress is slow.

“We’re letting anyone take what they want; then the army will do the rest,” explained a uniformed Hungarian official here. “It’s not an easy job.”

Times researcher Christine Courtney also contributed to this article.

GORBACHEV’S REQUEST

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BUSH’S PROSPECTS

Cheers for him may fade quickly in Poland, Hungary. Page 15