Broumov, in the Sudetenland by the Polish border, embodies the layered experience of Central European border towns, where patterns of migration, coexistence, and displacement have persistently reshaped community life. From the thirteenth century, Břevnov Monastery charters invited German settlers to cultivate land alongside Slavic inhabitants, transforming the area into a contact zone integrated into wider economic and cultural networks. This history of coexistence was later reframed by nationalist projects: after 1919, Sudeten Germans—once central to the Habsburg order—were recast as a marginalized minority within Czechoslovakia, their grievances mobilized by Nazi Germany to justify the 1938 Munich Agreement. The post-1945 expulsion of nearly three million Sudeten Germans, often under violent conditions, inscribed the borderland with trauma and demographic rupture. Broumov’s trajectory thus underscores how borderlands function simultaneously as sites of hybridity and contestation, where shifting sovereignties and identities render the frontier a space of both integration and exclusion.