title: Cold War Crossings: Border Poetics in Postwar German and Polish Literature
abstract: Focusing on transborder travel narratives by two German authors and one Polish author, “Cold War Crossings” investigates how their writing responds to the postwar demarcation of separate Eastern and Western spheres of influences. Central to each of their oeuvres is the topos of the border broadly conceived, from the material, ideological, and psychic boundaries of the Iron Curtain to the Saussurean bar of the linguistic sign. By presenting border-crossing as an act of both political and aestheti