Expellees chose memory over resettlement despite open Cold War borders.

Evidence

For their part, expellee leaders easily exploited Potsdam’s stipulation that a i nal border delineation could only be determined at a i nal peace conference, so that throughout the 1950s and even the 1960s, it was common knowledge that the border question was not necessarily closed. That even before 1970 thousands of expellees crossed the Iron Curtain to visit their old Heimat demonstrates that Cold War borders were not so insurmountable an obstacle as one might imagine, had expellees truly wanted to agitate for an actual return and resettlement. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 110

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the reader’s core question: what happens to threat-hardened solidarities when the obstacle is permeable — here the Cold War border proved surmountable yet agitation refused. — connects to: Expellees fixated on memory of home rather than the border propaganda war. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 114
• QUESTION: Why did leaders keep exploiting the open border question if constituents had already redirected to memory? What function did the border-revision platform serve for elites independent of mass support?