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After the Second World War, West German Catholics placed more faith in religious miracles than they did at almost any other period in the modern era. West German congregations reported eleven apparitions of the Virgin Mary to Church officials be-tween 1945 and 1954, as well as Europe’s most prominent twentieth century case of stigmata. Existing scholarship links the popularity of these alleged miracles to the ways in which Marian symbolism articulated anxieties about war trauma and the Cold War. This article illustrates how an interconnected movement of rural women, provincial priests, concentration camp survivors, and former prisoners of war based around Marian visions and stigmata emerged as a reaction not only to the Cold War, but also to Americanisation, consumerism, and the Nazi past. To frame the bitter conflicts between Marian pilgrims and Church hierarchy about the recognition of religious miracles, the article utilises Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘religious field’. It also takes into account the gendered character of the conflicts.
This article investigates the little known phenomenon of tourism to the Iron Curtain, using the example of the inter-German border. The practice of traveling to the demarcation line to see where Germany and Europe were divided peaked during the mid-1960s but was already in full swing by the mid-1950s and lasted until the fall of the border in 1989. Based on archival documents, postcards and tourist guidebooks, the article analyses the growth of a tourist infrastructure on the western side of the inter-German border and situates this travel as a form of ‘dark tourism’. It argues that seeing the border and visualising the partition of the country did little for overcoming it but rather tended to underwrite the political and territorial status quo. In the Cold War battle for public opinion, seeing the border allowed West Germans and their visitors from abroad to juxtapose freedom and prosperity with captivity and decay, thus advertising the superiority of the capitalist model over its socialist other.