What was the Iron Curtain and what was its purpose?

Answer 1

You should understand that the term Iron Curtain was a metaphor. It was not a physical structure. The Berlin Wall came close to being a literal iron curtain (although it was built mostly of bricks, with barbed wire on top). During the Cold War period (1945 - 1990) the USSR did not want to allow the free passage of people or commerce between eastern Europe which they controlled, and Western Europe which NATO controlled. They preferred to control all sources of information within the Soviet empire, and they didn't want outside viewpoints leaking in, which might enable the Soviet population to realize that they actually had a worse standard of living, much less freedom, and a less functional society than that of their global competitor, the Western World. The communist government therefore sealed the borders between these two sections of Europe, and these closed borders became known as the Iron Curtain. Like any curtain, they make it difficult to see what was going on past the curtain, and it was compared to iron because people were actually killed (particularly in Berlin) trying to get across. It was a rather terrible commentary on the supposed communist utopia that they had to work so hard to prevent people from leaving it (a similar situation exists today in North Korea, the Hermit Kingdom, wrapped in its own Iron Curtain).

Answer 2

To keep East Berliners from escaping to West Berlin