I grew up in the 1990s in a tiny Northern Bavarian town, at the border between what was then West Germany and Czechoslovakia. The hilly landscape with its quiet woodlands and baroque church steeples continued seamlessly on both sides. But on the Czechoslovakian side, all the buildings and the infrastructure appeared old and dilapidated. When my family took its first car trips after the fall of the Iron Curtain, my father would navigate around the potholes of neglected streets while I would sit in the back seat and anxiously stare at the washed-out facades of farmhouses, which the front gardens…