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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Edith Sheffer, âBurned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtainâ (Oxford UP, 2011)
Description: If Edith Shefferâs excellent Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford UP, 2011) has a single lesson, itâs that dividing a country is not as easy as you might think. You donât just draw a line and tell people that itâs now the âborder,â for in order for borders to be borders, they have to be seen as such. Sheffer shows that for quite a number of years after 1945, the Germans in Neustadt and Sonnebergâclosely situated towns in, respectively, the American and Soviet zones of occupationâdidnât really know whether the border...