You Might Also Like: Things That Go Boom

**Wolfram Britz** (0:01)
Good morning.

**Sam Baker** (0:04)
So this is the city center of Kehl?

**Wolfram Britz** (0:06)
Yeah, we're a little city. We got only 20,000 people. But it's Strasbourg who give us more business here, more bakeries, more hair cuttings, gold.

**Lacey Healey** (0:20)
This is Wolfram Britz. He's the mayor of the German town of Kehl, which sits across the border from Strasbourg, France, and he's speaking to our reporter, Sam Baker.

**Sam Baker** (0:30)
And we saw a school group. Do school children go to school, maybe on the other side of the border from where they live?

**Wolfram Britz** (0:36)
Yeah, we got a lot of children who come to Germany school. We got a lot of children to go to Strasbourg to the school.
We got a kindergarten. It's mixed. And I think it's good for the people, for the children to learn both sides of the Rhine. It brings us nearer and nearer together.

**Lacey Healey** (0:54)
A short walk from the city center is the border, a bridge over the Rhine River.

**Wolfram Britz** (0:58)
Yeah, and that's not a lot of traffic now.
But they stop. There you have 10, 15, 20 minutes sometimes to wait.

**Sam Baker** (1:09)
And do they stop everyone?

**Wolfram Britz** (1:11)
No.
No, they control. They look in the car and then they say, Oh, go on the side, we'll control. But not all.
There is a bicycle route and the foot walk. They don't control. They only control normally the vehicles. They not control the bridge over there. And I think that's stupid.

**Sam Baker** (1:34)
So this is what's confusing to me, because it's an emergency, so they say, but they don't check everyone.

**Wolfram Britz** (1:40)
What is the emergency? I don't know what the emergency is.

**Lacey Healey** (1:44)
This is Things That Go Boom. I'm Lacey Healey, and this season, we've been digging deeper into what it's like to live in a constant state of crisis.
Today, we're looking at the emergency that Germany's declared on its borders. It's a policy that's changed the way that this border works, cost hundreds of millions of euros, and becomes a routine that many Germans barely even notice that it's there.
There is a lot of news right now. Immigration enforcement, AI and the future of work, questions about presidential power and the economy, big stories that move fast and can be difficult to make sense of. That's why NPRs consider this slows down, to focus on one major story at a time. What's happening, why it matters, and what you need to know. And they do it all in under 15 minutes. This is the big thing for me, because I love to listen to my news, but I don't always have a lot of time. And I love how clearly Consider This explains the bigger picture. Not just politics, but what those changes could mean for government, institutions, and daily life, from aliens to the Iran War and everything in between. The podcast is hosted by the award-winning journalist behind NPR's All Things Considered, who know it's not enough to just tell you what happened. They help you understand why.
Follow NPR's Consider This podcast and keep asking why.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:18)
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**Lacey Healey** (4:12)
Germany insists that these border checks are temporary. But the problem is that they've now been renewed again and again and again. Depending on how you count them, Germany has kept some form of internal border controls in place for more than a decade. Which raises a bigger question. At what point does a temporary emergency stop being temporary?
For Maartje van der Woude, a professor of law and society at Leiden Law School in the Netherlands, who studies borders across Europe, that point has already come.

**Maartje van der Woude** (4:44)
I mean, I don't even call them temporary anymore. I think we've entered into a permanent state of emergency in Europe.