Borderland

Aussichtsturm Kniepenberg, Hitzacker

The Elbe is a 1094 kilometers long river which starts at the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše) of the Czech Republic and floats through Hamburg and into the North Sea close to Cuxhaven. During the times when Germany was separated into two different states the river was part of the inner-German border: after 1945 the US-American and British occupation zones met the Soviet zone here. On the side of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, DDR) a metal fence was created, towers built, villages removed and mines were placed.

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Inselstädtchen

Hitzacker, Germany

Hitzacker, Dannenberg, Gorleben – these are the names of small cities known well throughout Germany. They are part of the Wendland, a very secluded region of Lower Saxony. Here a temporary storage for atomic waste was created and a final storage was planned, without any good reasons. It was merely the fact that this region was at the inner-German border which supported the idea of storing this long-term dangerous waste there. Between 1995 and 2011 thirteen so-called Castor transports arrived there and protests grew massively over time. That brought the region onto the inner maps of Germans.

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