The Cold War in the Village
This chapter examines in more detail how the inhabitants of the two villages engaged with the other Germany and the division of their nation. The Neukirchers and Ebersbachers lived far away from the inner-German border, but in their everyday lives they nonetheless were forced to confront the impact of division. By analysing everyday practices through which the villagers positioned themselves in the political landscape of the Cold War, the chapter sheds new light on the asymmetry of (be)longing and othering in the divided nation. It demonstrates how the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers constructed their own respective imaginary East and imaginary West shaped by local concerns and searches for identity. In Neukirch, the villagers increasingly built up the West as an object of longing in their attempts to deal with the daily struggles of life in a shortage economy. The Ebersbachers, on the other hand, used the East as a Cold War ‘other’ to express pride in their economic recovery and gain a stronger sense of their own identity in a divided nation. These distorted images of the other Germany led to widespread alienation and misunderstandings in the first German–German encounters in the reunified nation. It was difference, rather than a shared sense of national identity, that dominated the experiences of the Neukirchers and Ebersbachers when the inner-German border disappeared in 1990.