in the wild east or the wild west. It all depends on your point of view. The fact is: this idyllic stream marked the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic until 1989. At the time of the inner-German border, you could see from here a cleared landscape with fences, control strips, control towers and much more. The border guards stretched along the 5 km wide restricted area on the GDR side from the Baltic Sea to Bavaria. The town of Büchen lay on the edge of the republic for decades. In order to compensate for the disadvantages of the peripheral location, the federal government introduced the peripheral zone funding in 1965. Until 2004, investments in infrastructure near the border were financially supported in this way.
BORDER TOUR
Landscape
In the east, the border fence was followed by the 5 km wide restricted area and large fields that belonged to the agricultural production cooperatives (LPGS) common in the GDR. After the border fences were dismantled, these state-owned companies were dissolved. Today, independent farmers or private cooperatives are working on the land again. The area on both sides of the former border is still characterized by fields and meadows. It seems unusually empty. The ditch still marks a border: between the federal states of Schleswig-Holstein, to which the Duchy of Lauenburg also belongs, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to the east.
Translated by Google •
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