THE COLD WAR & AFTER
- A unique and exciting journey from the Baltic to the Adriatic.
- Criss-crosses between west and east, assessing the impact of the Iron Curtain on both sides while having time for the main sights.
- Led by a historian, writer and former ambassador to relevant countries.
- 2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The shape of post-war Europe was determined at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945 – unwittingly, to some extent, because the reality of division between East and West was much more profound, more brutal and more permanent than had been envisaged by the western leaders.
A year later, when the Soviet Union was officially and popularly still the heroic ally in the victorious war against Hitler, Winston Churchill in his Fulton speech stated that an ‘Iron Curtain’ had descended across Europe. Rarely has a statesman bestowed on language a phrase which was to have such widespread and potent use.
Quite suddenly, and to most observers quite unexpectedly, the Iron Curtain vanished in the autumn of 1989. The barbed wire came down, minefields were cleared, watchtowers disarmed. But this removal of the physical barrier was merely symptomatic of profound changes in the lands behind the Iron Curtain, where governments and institutions collapsed and the lives of tens of millions of people were fundamentally changed. Soon free elections were held, Germany was united and market economics prevailed, binding ‘East’ Europe – which we now learnt again to call Central Europe – to the rest of the free world.
This tour is a study of one of the most fascinating and bizarre episodes in recent European history in the form of a thousand-mile journey through the heart of Europe from Lübeck on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, more or less along the line of the Iron Curtain. Of the divide itself scarcely a trace remains, but we visit places affected by the division and by its ending, and those in which the history expressed by the Iron Curtain was made. There are side expeditions to places significant in the history and life of this great swathe of Europe.
The principal themes of the tour are history and contemporary affairs, and it is on these that the lecturer’s discourse will concentrate. But the tour does nevertheless provide an extraordinary range of visual pleasures. Passing through seven countries, there is much to see in a variety of towns, cities and villages. Having been on the road to nowhere for most of the post-war period, many places escaped disfiguring over-development, and now energetic restoration is doing wonders to the areas formerly in the East. Moreover, the journey for most of the way is scenically enthralling. The obvious concomitant are long coach journeys, an average of 100 miles per day.