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I would like to thank the following people for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this article: this journal's editor and anonymous reviewers, Peter Michell, Louise Settle, Thomas Maulucci, and my fellow panel members at the German Studies Association conference in Milwaukee in September 2005.
In the early morning hours of December 19, 1975, a shooting incident took place at the inter-German border, on the boundary line between Thuringia and Bavaria, near the East German town of Hildburghausen. According to West German border guards on duty at the time, the moonlit calm of a cold and clear winter night was disrupted around 2:25 a.m. by the sound of submachine-gun fire from the eastern side of the boundary. During the next hours plenty of additional commotion ensued on East German territory: border soldiers combed the terrain behind the border; officers drove around directing the proceedings; helicopters buzzed overhead. Based on their observation of similar past incidents, West German authorities quickly deduced what had probably taken place: an attempted escape across the heavily fortified German-German border. The main variables not known at the time were whether the attempt had been successful and whether anyone had been hurt.1
Answers to both these questions also soon emerged. Reports spread of two deaths on the East German side, while a young man whose strong accent marked him as a native of the GDR region of Saxony hitchhiked his way ever deeper into West Germany in the gray December dawn. Obviously shaken, with soiled clothes and jittery hands, he told an initially skeptical motorist that he had just run across the border in a dramatic nocturnal escape. Eventually, the young man--whose name was Werner Weinhold--headed up to Marl, a small town near Essen, where he hoped to find shelter and initial assistance for his new life in the Federal Republic with relatives who resided in the area.2
In the days and weeks that followed, this particular incident assumed considerable public prominence, which was to persist for several years. During this period, the so-called "Weinhold case" ("Fall Weinhold") provoked prolonged and heated legal battles, partly within the Federal Republic but particularly between the two Germanies. More significantly, it also became a...