Joseph Goebbels originated
the phrase “Iron Curtain”
It is a common historical
misnomer that Winston Churchill coined the Cold War phrase the iron curtain. The phrase in fact originated with Joseph
Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, who used the phrase in a series of open
letters to the Western World. He hoped to divide the Allies by playing on the
Western fear of a spreading bolshevikism.
In 1945 several of these letters were reprinted in the London Times.
Goebbels,
of course, was unsuccessful in his effort, but a year later Winston Churchill
would have better luck when frightening the American populace with the phrase.
[It should come as no surprise Churchill never shared
his source.]
The
fact that it was Goebbels and not Churchill who coined the phrase should also
come as no surprise to anyone with a little theater history under his belt.
Goebbels, who came from the burlesque stages of 1920s Berlin, [Poison Dwarf fancied himself a
playwright.], was using as a metaphor, a common proscenium stage devise called
an iron curtain. A chainmail curtain used to protect audiences in the event of
an on-stage fire. All theaters in Europe had them, [or at least, were supposed
to have them.] Churchill, whose personal history had been one of public
service, both in the military and the political arena, would have had little
opportunity to encounter the device.
In
America, in 1946, in Fulton Missouri, where iron curtains were not employed,
the phrase worked particularly well for Churchill. Most American theaters at
the time “protected” their audiences with an asbestos curtain instead, lucky
us. This American lack of exposure to the actual chainmail curtain made
Churchill’s metaphor that much more effective. As an alien sound to the
American ear, its abstraction gave it that much more of a punch; the audience
was free to visualize a Soviet ‘iron curtain descending across the
Continent’ any way it
chose.
Being
a cold War baby myself, mine was a large forbidding wall of dull gray, riveted
steel. I can still see in my mind, reigniting it every four years, come the
Olympics.
Personal note: Come the Olympics, I
sure do miss the Soviets; they made such a wonderful nemesis. I do not know
about you, but I just can’t muster the same desire to defeat the Chinese.
Defeating the communists at ping-pong just doesn’t seem as important.
Source: "Das Jahr 2000," [The Year 2000] Joseph Goebbels, 25 February
1945
.
. .The third, Stalin, follows much more far-reaching goals than his two
comrades. He certainly does not plan to announce them publicly, but he and his
200 million slaves will fight bitterly and toughly for them. He sees the world
differently than do those plutocratic brains. He sees a future in which the
entire world is subjected to the dictatorship of the Moscow Internationale,
[sic] which means the Kremlin. His dream may seem fantastic and absurd, but if
we Germans do not stop him, it will undoubtedly become reality. That will
happen as follows: If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets,
according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, would
occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the
Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this
enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations
would be slaughtered. The Jewish press in London and New York would probably
still be applauding. All that would be left is human raw material, a stupid,
fermenting mass of millions of desperate proletarianized
[sic] working animals who would only know what the Kremlin wanted them to know
about the rest of the world. Without leadership, they would fall helplessly
into the hands of the Soviet blood dictatorship. The remainder of Europe would
fall into chaotic political and social confusion that would prepare the way for
the Bolshevization that will follow. Life and existence in these nations would
become hell, which was after all the point of the exercise.