| Abstract: | During the early years after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a number of smuggling operations from behind the Wall were executed, and the reports of them spread through the Western media. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the popular Swedish men’s magazines Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt published several exclusive photo reportages about such operations, providing Swedish readers with information about the East Germans’ desire to escape their country, and the West Germans’ willingness to assist. This article discusses the Swedish escape reports as examples of border crossing through their form as well as their content. It is analysed, how the escape reports published in Sweden both represented and generated border-crossing activity. The smuggling stories also illustrate the entangled character of popular print media: the travels of texts and pictures beyond national, cultural and lingual borders as well as travels between apposite publications. The material of the article consists of a total of ten reportages published in Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt between 1965–1966 and 1973. |
