Since the coronavirus started to spread around the world earlier this year there have been countless stories of nature rebounding: bobcats and black bears venturing onto the roadways in Yosemite National Park, Venice canals so clear that schools of fish are visible again; seismologists finding that movements in the earth’s upper crust have slowed down… Read more At home on this earth?
Staying Grounded in the Time of the Coronavirus A while ago, I wrote about how I came to see aspects of my border expedition as something like a pilgrimage. While my journey was not literally aimed at the Holy Land or a sacred site, it nevertheless touched on something I consider in the realm of… Read more The Grounded Pilgrim:
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Anna had reserved a room for me in a small Gasthaus one village over from Kella. During GDR times, Pfaffschwende had been just outside the Schutzstreifen, the high-security “protective zone”. The narrow road to Pfaffschwende had been the only one by which Kella residents could access the rest of the GDR. As she and Andreas drove me… Read more Dating in the Borderland
January 24: The Birds at the End of the World: Renewal and Remembrance in the German Borderland – Kerstin Lange When the Berlin Wall fell under the pressure of peaceful protests thirty years ago, the 900-mile-long border that had separated the two German states also became obsolete. During the four decades that humans were kept… Read more The Birds at the End of the World: Jan. 24, 2020, 7 pm at the North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier
… and other stories from Kella, the little village that found itself next to the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. After Kaffeetrinken with a view of Braunrod – the former “window on the GDR” – Anna took me up the hill behind her house to the chapel I had read about in Daphne’s book.… Read more The chapel in the no-man’s land, and the monk who pushed the envelope
This article from the Werra Rundschau’s January 1, 2020 issue, about the festivities marking the 30thanniversary of the border opening between Kella and Braunrod, describes the improvisation that was necessary to set up a border crossing in the absence of any guidance from “above”. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, had thrown the… Read more 30 years later: Kella and its neighbors commemorate the opening of the border
Today’s post explores how “our everyday lives are criss-crossed by border zones” (anthropologist Renato Rosaldo) and how not only physical but also social borders shape our identities. Find out what the late anthropologist Daphne Berdahl had to say about this and how she came to settle in Kella for her field work shortly after Reunification… Read more Of borders, identities, and friendship
The next few posts will be about my visits with people in Kella, population plus minus 500. When Germany was divided after WWII, Kella ended up in the 500-meter Schutzstreifen (“protective zone”) right next to the border strip, which meant that its residents had to put up with considerable restrictions on everyday life, imposed by… Read more Visiting
One of my favorite places on my border expedition was the German Unity Sculpture Park in the Rhön Mountains. The park sits directly in the former border strip between East and West Germany and was created by the artist and engineer Jimmy Fell. I found the installations – among them “Expulsion”, the “Miracle of Leipzig”,… Read more News from the German Unity Sculpture Park
