"Stern der Völkerfreundschaft?" Cross-Cultural Encounters during Open-Border Politics between East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia Author: Mark Aaron Keck-Szajbel, PhD Candidate, University of California Berkeley

Abstract: From 1972 on, an open-border project (which required only a personal identification card to cross) in the East Bloc would expand to include Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany; travel to Hungary, and Bulgaria also became much more liberal. Unlike the European Union, however, member states of this open-border agreement were continually forced to curtail rights in order to sustain what was called “reibungslose Reiseverkehr.”

Open-border diplomacy was political on many levels. Ideologically speaking, this cross-cultural coexistence, the so-called “border of peace,” was intended to be the fruit of the socialist republics from the Elbe to the Niemen, from the Baltic to the Donau, and the media in all of these countries actively promoted travel to the ‘friend’s land.’ For the citizens of these countries, the open border had a very practical function: East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia became not only vacation destinations; the border-crosser was also interested in baby clothes, sausages, spare car parts, canned fish, or leather shoes. In other words, buying in foreign countries of the Eastern Bloc was synonymous to unorganized tourism.

In this paper, I would like to interrogate the changing meaning of the “open-border” both on a political and sociological level within Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. I focus primarily on everyday experiences of cross-cultural encounters – in literature, films, the press, and oral history – to reveal not only how the so-called “Border of Peace” was a socialist failure, but also how it later provided societies in member states with crucial lessons on their path towards the Schengen Zone.