The Pushkin Club invites you to join Timothy Phillips in conversation with Masha Karp about his new book The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey along Europe’s Cold War Border.
The Iron Curtain divided the continent of Europe, with the Berlin Wall as its most visible, infamous manifestation. Since the Cold War ended and these borders came down, Europe has transformed itself. But we cannot consign the tensions and restrictions of the past to history. At a time when Russia is once again making war, when divisions elsewhere in Europe are on the rise, and when the rhetoric and reality of the Cold War have resurfaced, these old fault lines have new resonance. What do the Curtain and the Wall mean today? What have they left in their wake?
In this major new book, Timothy Phillips takes the reader on a journey across 5,000km and eight decades. Travelling the length of the Iron Curtain from the Arctic Circle to the Caucasus, he explores the borderlands where the clash of civilisations was at its most intense during the Cold War, and where the world’s most powerful ideologies became tangible in reinforced concrete and barbed wire. He looks at the new Europe that emerged from the ruins, and meets people who bear vivid witness to times of change. Some look back on the Cold War with nostalgia and affection; others despise it, unable to forgive the hard and sometimes lost decades that their families, friends and nations endured. In these historic landscapes lie buried many of the seeds of our world’s current disputes – over borders, and about belonging and the meaning of progress. Phillips’ book is a timely study of the legacy of political and cultural conflict that continues to haunt and shape Europe over thirty years on from its supposed demise.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Timothy Phillips is the author of The Curtain and the Wall: A Modern Journey Along Europe's Cold War Border (Granta, 2022), The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians, and the Jazz Age (Granta, 2017) and Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (Granta, 2008). He grew up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London. He holds a doctorate in Russian from Oxford University and has written and spoken widely on British and Russian history.