Rabbit a La Berlin, a film by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski which will be screened on Wednesday 20 August, examines the plights of a colony of rabbits which lived between the two barriers of the Berlin Wall. Enclosed in this space, the animals lived undisturbed lives – until the Wall was taken down. Then the rabbits had to readjust, and learn to live in a new environment (much like the people, of course, who had to unify what was once West and East). The rabbits who inhabited the “death strip” between the West and the East are not the only example of nature caught in human conflict.
The Animals in War Memorial in London. Tamsin Slater CC
Animals such as horses and dogs have long been used by the military, but the impact of war can go far beyond such matters of “utility”. As a human endeavour, war and armed conflict can have a profound impact on the environment and natural systems: landscapes, for instance, have been transformed by advancing militaries and migrating populations. What is more, this impact is not only inflicted during the fighting of war. Military preparations, such as training and the development of a military infrastructure, also affect the environment. And in the aftermath of war, reconstruction once again leaves a mark.
The Cold War, in this respect, presents a specific example, in which a conflict was not actively fought (at least in the European arena), but nonetheless dictated human activities and shaped their movements. It therefore also affected the natural elements of this continent. The rabbits in the “death strip” lived happy, untroubled lives because no people or natural enemies were present in the enclosed space.
In another case which mirrors the Berlin rabbits’ story, groups of deer also felt the effects of the Iron Curtain, which stretched into what was then Czechoslovakia. At the time, three parallel electrified fences presented a heavily guarded border: over the years, 500 people were shot as they tried to escape into West Germany. The barrier would now traverse a combined German/Czech national park, where a wildlife crossing has been made to aide red deer who migrate in the summertime. However, a recently concluded study shows that the animals in the Sumava Natural Park in the Czech Republic now balk at crossing the area where the fences once stood. The animals on the German side present the same behaviour. Where people are now freely crossing political borders, the deer seem to have kept the Cold War distinction “in mind”.
With the 25-year anniversary of the fall of the Wall, none of the deer living today would remember the fence as it stood. Red deer typically live for 15 years, meaning that the animals now fearful of the traverse are at least of the second generation since the fall – implying that fawns would have adapted their mothers’ migratory behaviours in avoiding the barrier.
The Cold War is not the only case of a conflict that is characterised by a stand-off. It still echoes in the relations between North and South Korea that have been restrained for decades, a fact that is represented by the so-called Korean Demilitarised Zone. It lies on the original boundaries between the US and USSR brief administrations of Korea post-World War Two, and was reinstated in the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War. The DMZ roughly divides the Korean Peninsula in half: it is 250 km long and four meters wide, extending on both sides of the front line. It is a buffer zone, with large numbers of troops still stationed alongside it.
Only two small villages remain within the boundaries of the DMZ; the rest of the zone is a deadly place for people as the area remains heavily patrolled and tensions are still high. As a result, the DMZ has become an involuntary, unintended wildlife park. The area encompasses a unique geography including mountains, prairies and swamps – and thus is a unique temperate habitat. It is home to a number of near-extinct species: the Korean tiger, Amur leopard and Asiatic black bear are free to roam this “green ribbon”. While the guns and land mines are keeping people out, they are de facto keeping other species alive.
A deer runs along the train tracks at the DMZ
One important note, however, is that this ecosystem has a precarious future: demilitarised zones might not remain in that stage indefinitely, and especially not if a war were to break out. Should the tensions between the two Koreas become hotter, the troops now lurking on the border will cross the DMZ, destroying its unique ecosystem. In a telling occurrence, South Korea’s submission to UNESCO to create an official wildlife park in the southern part of the DMZ, has been blocked by North Korea as a violation of the armistice agreement.
View the trailer for Rabbit à la Berlin here:
Rabbit à la Berlin
Academy Award-nominated documentary Rabbit à la Berlin uses the Berlin Wall rabbit population as a metaphor for the huge transition post-communist societies underwent. For 28 years, the Death Zone between the Berlin Walls was a safe home for wild rabbits: full of grass, no predators, guards protecting them from human disturbance. They were enclosed but happy. When the rabbit population grew to thousands, guards started to remove them but the rabbits survived and stayed until, one day, the wall fell down. The rabbits now had to abandon the comfortable system they had been living in. They moved to West Berlin, where they’ve have been living in small colonies ever since. They are still learning how to live in the free world, just as many citizens of Eastern Europe. Directed by Bartek Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski | Duration: 39’| Year: 2009
EXIT
In October 1989 the East German authorities tightened border security following the exodus of GDR citizens that had started earlier in the summer. Through exceptional and rare footage shot between 10 and 20 October 1989, Exit shows East German refugees who managed to cross the Polish border in order to reach the West German embassy in Warsaw. For the first time they talk openly about life in East Germany, not knowing the world is about to change. Directed by Małgorzata Bieńkowska-Buehlmann | Duration: 30′ | Year: 1990-2009
Oxygen
During the communist dictatorship in Romania (1945-1989), thousands of people risked their lives attempting to flee their country. Despair made them invent the most incredible methods to cross the border illegally. Some of them managed to escape, but many lost their lives in these attempts. Oxygen is a free re-enactment of a real case: a man who tried to cross the Danube illegally using an oxygen cylinder, to escape the communist Romania. Directed by Adina Pintilie | Duration: 30′ | Year: 2010
The screening of Rabbit à la Berlin kindly supported by Deckert Distribution
]]>
Free societies crumbled in the decade after World War II, when Stalin took much of Eastern and Central Europe, and in a single-minded fashion, dismantled the existing institutions to build totalitarianism.
This period provides the subject for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s latest book Iron Curtain, which she discussed with journalists and columnist for The Times, Oliver Kamm before a sold-out audience at the Frontline Club on Monday 21 January.
“Why did anybody go along with totalitarianism?” she wondered before starting the book.
“Describe the scene for us,” Kamm began.
“It’s hard,” Applebaum answered. After the war, “the level of physical destruction…you had absolutely flat cities…totally destroyed transportation systems…economies that didn’t function – at all.”
“One of my most interesting interviews…was with a Polish writer… He was a Stalinist [at first], and he described that to me… Everything his parents had told him, and everything his schools had taught him, turned out to be wrong… The army failed. The government failed society collapsed… And that caused a kind of break in his mentality… he said…’you know, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe the communists are right’.”
Applebaum described what followed:
“You had no good choices. You couldn’t just decide to be a freedom fighter and stand up for democracy. I mean, you could, then: A. You would be arrested. B. Your wife would be arrested. C. Your child would get kicked out of college. D. Your mother would be thrown out of the hospital. Because the State had control over so many aspects of society, people had really very bad and hard decisions to make.”
But not even Stalin, totalitarianism’s maestro, couldn’t pull it off.
“The idea is that everyone will become convinced. They will be re-educated…and there will be no opposition… But somehow, it never works…[Even] at the very height of Stalinism in 1951 or ’52, they never actually made it.”
Yet for four decades, the Soviet bloc lived, and its unraveling still boggles Applebaum.
“It all seems so implausible to me. I mean: how did it happen? How can you explain it? Why did Gorbachev do what he did? Why did he just give up that enormous empire? Nobody was making him do it… Really, it could have gone on a lot longer.”
In much subtler shades, it has – under Vladimir Putin.
“He does care a lot, pretty inexplicably, in fact, about Pussy Riot,” Applebaum said. “There is a direct line from Putin to [Yuri] Andropov,” Soviet Ambassador to Budapest during Hungary’s rebellion 1956, and head of the KGB in the early 1980s.
“Putin came of age in Andropov’s KGB… He remembers ’89. He was taught by Andropov, who remembers ’56… The kind of treatment that dissidents or artists got in the Soviet Union in the first half of the ‘80s when Andropov was in power was almost as severe as in Stalin’s time… What was the conclusion? … all of these little groups who you thought weren’t important…you can let them go, [but] it can all unravel, and you can have an armed rebellion.”
Watch the full discussion here:
]]>