This fine collection originated in a series of panels held at the 2009 German Studies Association conference to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The editors hope to make a self-consciously interdisciplinary contribution to the continuing “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences, and in particular to the growing area of “border studies.” Their introduction is informed by a critique of continuing post-Wall attempts to impose brutal order on the physical and social landscape, such as at the U.S.-Mexican border and the West Bank wall, and by sympathy for the work of artists and activists in subverting such attempts. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, they offer a subtle discussion of the multiple perspectives required to analyze both the “territorializing tendencies” (p. 1) often imposed from above and the complex ways in which they are interpreted, negotiated, transformed, and subverted by various actors on the ground. They also call upon researchers to reflect on the ways in which they accept and reinforce “border thinking” in their work (p. 9).

The volume's eleven chapters offer a diverse range of case studies mainly drawn from contemporary or postwar Europe, and with a heavy but by no means exclusive focus on German-speaking central Europe. They are grouped in three sections: city walls, border zones, and migrating boundaries. In the first section, Yair Mintzker examines the dialectical relationship between the absolutist monarchy's policy of defortifying cities in seventeenth-century France and its fortification of the state's external borders. Olaf Briese discusses the multitude of camp forms in Nazi and postwar Berlin. Eric Jarosinski provides a close reading of the ambivalent nature of Dani Karavan's installation Grundgesetz 49 near the Reichstag, which promises transparency but also serves as a barrier between the population and the political process. And Daniele Vicherat Mattar explores the diverse impacts and local renegotiations of three attempts at strict urban demarcation: the wall erected in 2006 around a dysfunctional immigrant neighborhood in Padua; the Spanish/European Union (EU)-Moroccan border fence encircling the Spanish north-African enclave of Ceuta; and the so-called “peace lines” erected since the 1970s and especially since 1998 to separate Irish nationalist and unionist communities in Belfast.

In the second section, Muriel Blaive and Thomas Lindenberger discuss the practice of communist-era border guarding in the small Czech town of České Velenice on the Austrian border as a blend of imported Soviet-style border governance, local pathologies arising from the town's Austrian history and the postwar expulsions of ethnic Germans, and the ability of local communities to appropriate and accommodate the strictures of communist rule. David E. Barclay explores the “complicated contrivance” of West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, an “unheroic” era in which the earlier struggle over the city and the presence of the Wall lost much of their salience for both the Western Allies and many residents. And Steffi Marung traces the implications of the EU's eastern expansion for Poland's relationship with its western and eastern neighbors: casting off any notion of being Germany's pupil and protégé, Polish political elites are seeking to define a new role on the EU's eastern border, primarily as a bridge that connects “Europe” and its eastern neighbors rather than a bulwark between them.

In the final section, Patricia Ehrkamp discusses German and Swiss debates about the integration and religious expression of Islamic communities, specifically surrounding the 2009 Swiss referendum on banning further construction of minarets, the ongoing use of the controversial notion of a German “Leitkultur,” and the construction of a central mosque in Cologne, highlighting the often-overlooked broader implications for liberal democracies of debates over immigration, integration, and tolerance. Isa Blumi explores the short- and long-term impact of the failure of West German state and nongovernment actors to recognize the diversity of guest workers' identities and backgrounds and in particular the marginalization of Kosovar Albanians who did not fit readily into state-of-origin-derived categories of Turks, Yugoslavs, or Greeks. Jeffrey Jurgens critiques the invisibility of migrants in dominant accounts of German division and reunification, especially in public memory, and highlights migrants' experiences of living with and even dying at the Berlin Wall. Finally, performance artist Gülgün Kayim discusses the history of conflict and bordering between Cypriot Greeks and Turks and her own artistic endeavors to come to terms with and promote community dialogue over traumatic and divisive memories.

As with so many collections, most individual authors do not directly engage with the theoretical framework outlined by the editors, and so a specific, novel, overall contribution to the literature remains elusive. The heralded interdisciplinarity perhaps also ultimately boils down more to a successful multidisciplinarity. Nevertheless, the individual contributions are almost invariably of a high standard and will be of interest not only to researchers but also to students in a range of fields, including contemporary German history, European Studies, political geography, and border studies. The contributions are well written, and the volume as a whole is well edited and includes numerous illuminating images.