Yuliya Komska

The icon curtain : the Cold War's quiet border

The Iron Curtain did not exist - at least not as we usually imagine it. Rather than a stark, unbroken line dividing East and West in Cold War Europe, the Iron Curtain was instead made up of distinct landscapes, many in the grip of divergent historical and cultural forces for decades, if not centuries. This book traces a genealogy of one such landscape - the woods between Czechoslovakia and West Germany - to debunk our misconceptions about the iconic partition. Yuliya Komska transports readers to the western edge of the Bohemian Forest, one of Europes oldest borderlands, where in the 1950s civilians set out to shape the so-called prayer wall. A chain of new and repurposed pilgrimage sites, lookout towers, and monuments, the prayer wall placed two longstanding German obsessions, forest and border, at the heart of the centurys most protracted conflict. Komska illustrates how civilians used the prayer wall to engage with and contribute to the new political and religious landscape. In the process, she relates West Germanys quiet sylvan periphery to the tragic pitch prevalent along the Iron Curtains better-known segments. Steeped in archival research and rooted in nuanced interpretations of wide-ranging cultural artifacts, from vandalized religious images and tourist snapshots to poems and travelogues, The Icon Curtain pushes disciplinary boundaries and opens new perspectives on the study of borders and the Cold War alike.

Epilogue: Finding Our Minds

It is difficult to change our minds about language—or anything else—when our minds feel or appear lost. This, losing one’s mind, is the effect of constant “shock events,” unsolicited, unexpected, and unregulated, and the attendant rolling barrage of bad news, falsehoods, and partisan invectives. In the epilogue, the authors suggest faster-acting antidotes than the more durable routines of critique, correction, and care endorsed in the book. In three personal reflections, they ask what other kinds of jolts—surprises or confrontations—can help bring the readers closer to “refusing the spoils of interactional hegemony,” which is how the book defines linguistic disobedience. The suggestion is to turn to the artifacts, writings, or objects that can baffle without inducing chaos or harness visual and material properties of language generatively.

Introduction: Obeying and Disobeying

In the introduction, the authors account for traditional understandings of “obedience as decorum” and “obedience as deference to power.” These models, they suggest, no longer characterize linguistic obedience in 2018, when far-right bloggers, troll armies, and the US President style themselves as underdog insurgents, despite having immediate access to the levers of political power. The focus is on how the free market in linguistic disfiguration, legitimated since the 1990s by self-appointed language experts, turns the incentive to speak in civically destructive ways into a lucrative political economy. The authors accordingly define linguistic disobedience as those practices of language care, critique, and correction that—amid such a political economy of incentivized disfiguration—forgo the spoils of everyday interactional domination, in pursuit of better, more just contributions.