Introduction
As a person born in the late 1970s I am old enough to remember the existence of two German states and the Iron Curtain that ran between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic until 1989, as peaceful revolutions overthrew the economically and morally bankrupt communist systems throughout Eastern Europe.
My grandparents and many of my relatives lived (and still live) in the Oberpfalz (Upper Palatinate), a north-eastern part of Bavaria that bordered Czechoslovakia and hence a Warsaw Pact country during the Cold War.…
