Not to be glib about this, but it's like the division in the country itself becomes a division in her. Why has Germany become such a metaphor for . . . you can talk about what happened in the Eastern Bloc. But artists—- German and non-German — keep going back to Germany. Is it the novelty of the divided country? I think so. I believe it is, it is very special. I don't know anything like it anywhere else. Maybe Korea. That might be interesting if ever it comes down, that might be maybe a similar thing. It is the same country and it has been artificially divided. And it's the same language, they have the same families, and they're being divided and they develop in a totally different way, and then it come back together. So . . . they're very foreign. I mean, me as a Westerner, it was very foreign to me, the way [East Germans] think, the way they behave. I had to learn a lot about them to understand their language and that was fascinating for me. I did that when I was a student when I went to East Berlin to the acting school and that helped me a lot, that period of time actually, to portray Barbara now.
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