The 'Iron Curtain': It stretched for about 800 kilometers in East Germany and Czechoslovakia along the national border with Bavaria, encircling the Free State from the north and east. Barbed wire fences, watchtowers, minefields, and heavily armed posts characterized the landscape on both sides. Yet, nuances emerged that gave the Bavarian-Czechoslovak border a differentiated character from a western perspective, which cannot solely be explained by the political and social overdetermination of the German division. This phenomenon of a perceived distinctiveness of the Czechoslovak 'Iron Curtain' is explored in this study through a historical comparison.