The binary way in which we are taught to think about the Iron Curtain that Longo points out in the first chapter, I think, is a tendency that extends across a lot of the ways in which we think about policies surrounding immigration. Too often narratives like the organizers of the picnic, officials within the government that were helping the organizers, what Longo terms “a shadow archive of secret decisions,” and kind strangers that are seemingly encountered through happenstance, like Norbert, are lost to these broader narratives that fit the political agenda or narrative of the times. As I was thinking through what it meant to introduce personal narratives that complicate these historical monoliths, I found myself continuing to return to this idea of “truth” in journalism and ethnography. I think often in an investigative or archival piece there is a tendency to pursue what we conceptualize as “objective truth.” But I appreciated the fact that Longo paid equal attention to “personal truths” in capturing the border—that is, what the border meant to the people in his stories, rather than simply focusing on the border’s physical or political qualities.
I do think, however, that there are limits to fully capturing “personal truths,” particularly when you are an outsider looking in. This idea is illustrated in the section where Longo drives to Lake Fertő in an attempt to experience what the border meant to the Hungarians at that time. While Longo describes the geographic features of the lake, there are limits to how “accurately” a writer can describe any given experience that is not their own. The limits of our ability as journalists to totally empathize or understand the experiences of the people that we study, and how to address or confront those limits was another lingering question that I had. I’m also curious to know what Professor Longo, as well as others in the class, think about what the Lake Fertő symbolized. To me, it seemed as though it was a place in which the people of Sopron, and later the Hungarians, were able to enjoy a limited form of freedom, yet simultaneously served as a reminder that the border was insurmountable—that it could be maintained without the barbed wire or fencing.
I also found Longo’s choice to write himself into parts of the book interesting. Particularly where László expresses to Longo the challenges of the project: “One of the challenges of your project, he says, is going to be to capture how crazy it was in those days.” I appreciated the fact that the book used these interludes to capture the limitations of the Project as well as how Longo went about gathering information.
I also found the idea of the border as both a physical and imagined object as particularly compelling. The line, “the East, the Iron Curtain soon became an uncrossable divide, powerful not just in its scale, but also in the mythology that justified its rule,” as well as the fact that Simone’s family had never previously seen the border or even knew where it was before crossing it particularly capture this point. I appreciated the fact that the reading captured not just the physical qualities of the border but its inherent ideological qualities as well. As we look at different immigration policies throughout the semester, I am particularly excited to explore these two dimensions of what borders physically are and what they mean to the people who cross and maintain them.
