PHANTOM BORDER

Lange, who was born in West Germany, recounts her trip to the former border of a once-divided country.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the author grew up in Northwestern Germany and saw East Germany as a “distant shadow, a blank shape behind the Iron Curtain,” a “mysterious country about which I knew almost nothing until it ceased to exist.” In 1987, she moved to Vermont, a place that eventually became another home, or “second Heimat,” for her, but despite her acquired American sensibilities,she longed to reconnect with her German roots. In 2016, Lange commenced a multiyear expedition across the German borderland (much of it on her father’s “trusty Bremen Bike”) exploring the area referred to as the Green Belt and known for its “remarkable biodiversity.” In this exceedingly thoughtful memoir, the author interviews many Germans who lived under the acrimonious bifurcation of Germany into ideologically opposed states and explores how this experience affected their own senses of Heimat. A philosophically searching reflection on the very meaning of the term emerges from her investigations: “Heimat is inseparably tied to a person’s feelings about that physical place: a sense of belonging, of feeling understood, of connectedness with a particular landscape and familiar people, of not being a stranger, of one’s native habitat.” The notions of habitats and ecosystems are central to her reflections as she notes the ways in which the “brutality of the border” was also a “haven for so many creatures” and the Green Belt was “an oasis of remarkable space and quiet in a fast-moving world.” Lange also writes astutely about the “dark side of Heimat,” the nationalistic fervor to exclude “anyone ‘other.’” This is an impressively erudite remembrance, one that invokes the spirits of Thoreau and Goethe.

An engrossing recollection, brimming with insight and emotional candor.