Customer Reviews

The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I grew up behind that border, lived in this grey cold world. The photographs brought back a lot of supressed memories. Looking through the book, I realized that these memories should be kept alive. Awesome and chilling at the same time. I would recommend this book to anyone....the era has passed but it was real. A lot of lives were lost at that border and many untold stories are buried with it. To me that book is a tribute to all who suffered in the name of freedom, I was just one of many.

The Lost Border by Brian Rose fulfills an historical need by photographing the Iron Curtain before it was relegated to the dustbin of history. The photos are are in color and fill the need of being historical rather than some modern black and white modern art form which would have defeated the whole purpose of the book. I have walked the Berlin Wall many times in the 60's & 70's to take photos and aggravate the guards and for me to see the rest of the Iron Curtain in this large format book was a pleasure. I compliment Mr Rose on his endeavor. These photos show the stark reality of the evil of communism in clear detail. The Lost Border is an asset to any library; home or otherwise.

I haven't seen anyone else put together a book like this, with shots from all along the Iron Curtain in the Cold War. My only disappointment was that there's not more of it - because the work in here is excellent, and I would have loved for it to not end so soon. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in what the Soviets did to Eastern Europe until the fall of communism.

With photos taken in the mid 1980s the author takes us on a pictorial trip along the former Iron Curtain from the Baltic sea coast at Travemunde (West-East Germany) to the Adriatic sea coast at Trieste (Italy-Yugolsalvia [today Slovenia]); with a separate chapter on the Berlin Wall. They are superb photos full of (sad) atmosphere, poignancy and historical importance. Like another reader, I just wish there were more of them. The chapters with photos from the period following the collapse of the Soviet empire and thus its lengthy prison wall with the west are relevant too. The author doesn't provide any lengthy description of the physical nature of the fortifications, history of escape attempts, as well as the constrast in the lives of people on each side of the borders but that has been the subject of other books and there is no need to; the brief comments combined with the pictures are all you need to appreciate it.

This book is a must for those who have never seen the Border regions during the cold war. These pictures show the regions as they were then. The photographs in this book show these areas as beautiful, tranquil, quiet and foreboding, with the ever present eye of East German Guards peering at you from the border towers. Those fences and no mans land are gone now, and have since been replaced by reconstruction. These photographs are very rare and exclusive, taken throughout Berlin, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czeshoslovakia and Italy. It is a haunting reminder what communism was, especially for those who lived between the fences.

I have mixed emotions about this book. I have been looking for a book about the East German Czech border for a long time. Unfortunately this book only spends half of the space on the East West German border. The remainder is about Berlin.

The photography is wonderful; especially the border trace photos; there just are not enough of them. There is little narrative as this is a coffee table book and it is told through the eyes of a tourist; the stories that could be told by all the Troopers who walked those spots. There is no discourse on the history of the border.

This book is for a serious border memorabilia collector.

This is a well printed book that perfectly displays these fading relics of the Cold War.