The Germans have an expression called Mauer im Kopf, which translates roughly as “the wall in the mind.” After the East and the West reunified in 1990, the legal border between the two Germanys was dissolved. The checkpoints disappeared, the barbed wire was ripped away, and the Berlin Wall was finally taken down. But even fifteen years after reunification, many Germans still overestimated the distances between cities in the East and the West. There was, it seems, a lingering psychological distance that betrayed the nation’s geography, creating a virtual border in people’s minds. Although that
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