Wine, Bach, and Cuckoo Clocks

If a friendship lasts longer than fifteen years, you're no longer friends. You're family.

Since childhood, Lorna has been curious about Germany and her ancestral roots there. She was fourteen when her great-grandfather died, a man who was born in what is now part of Ukraine but who was a self-proclaimed, proud German.

Having grown up during the Cold War, Lorna had always viewed the former East and West Germany as being starkly different until 1999, when she met Christine, a woman from the for...