The truth, briefly stated, is that Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. He is a modernist in that his fiction shows a first-rate human mind stripped of all foundations in religious or ideological certainty--a mind turned thus wholly in on itself. His stories are inbent and hermetic, with the oblique terror of a game whose rules are unknown and its stakes everything.

And the mind of those stories is nearly always a mind that lives in and through books. This is because Borges the writer is, fundamentally, a reader. The dense, obscure allusiveness of his fiction is not a tic, or even really a style; and it is no accident that his best stories are often fake essays, or reviews of fictitious books, or have texts at their plots' centers, or have as protagonists Homer or Dante or Averroës. Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentually--consciously--a creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or cleverly disguised critic. It is because he knows that there's finally no difference--that murderer and victim, detective and futigive, performer and audience are the same. Obviously, this has postmodern implications (hence the pontine claim above), but Borges's is really a mystical insight, and a profound one. It's also frightening, since the line between monism and solipsism is thin and porous, more to do with spirit than with mind per se. And, as an artistic program, this kind of collapse/transcendence of individual identity is also paradoxical, requiring a grotesque self-obsession combined with an almost total effacement of self and personality. Tics and obsessions aside, what makes a Borges story Borgesian is the odd, ineluctable sense you get that no one and everyone did it. [...]

A friend from Romania--she speak fluent German and had been arrested numerous times as a dissident in her home country--couldn't convince the German authorities of her German identity. Livid with rage, she asked whether she ought to mention that her father had been in the SS and that her uncle had died serving the same organization. They responded coolly that proof of that sort would help. Anywhere else in the world, you'd do better to hide your father's Nazi Party papers--but in Germany they still had their uses.

[...]

From the beginning, it should have been obvious that the Federal Republic's invitation to all Germans would remain heartfelt only so long as the East German authorities kept the masses of potential guests away. When the Wall became more porous with Gorbachev's glasnost, the West Germans' joy at reuniting declined visibly. They paled when they saw how many people they'd invited. Two hundred thousand ethnic German resettlers arrived in 1988, and about 350,000 in 1989, and that doesn't include the East German refugees. In 1990, between 400,000 and 450,000 ethnic Germans "came home," as the West Germans put it, and immigration authorities now fear that, as their native economies collapse, millions more ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may remember their German origins.