Even the sky looks good: Northern lights over the Lausitz near Welzow in August.
Photo: imago
If you hike from the outskirts of Berlin along forest paths to Brandenburg, you will see fewer and fewer people. Sometimes just two or three a day. But if you do, you will also be greeted. That never happens in Berlin parks. It would also be too tiring: all the people in the city. There are far fewer of these in Brandenburg – and that makes this federal state very pleasant. Also very good: it is a largely flat country and, with the exception of Potsdam (nicer than Berlin) and Cottbus (not nicer), a cityless country, which often hides its charms in a surly hint of tourism. Because the residents primarily want their peace and quiet. Some look like cowboys, there are vintage US cars or four-wheel drive Jeeps parked in front of their houses. Others have seemingly retained their blues hairstyle forever, even if they were born after 1989. Is this perhaps German Texas, only poor and without oil? Not quite, you often see Greater German hairstyles at gas stations. But no one here is armed. At most, 3,000 lakes without lifeguards. You have to be careful not to sink.
Westerners’ jokes are slowly fading. Wiglaf Droste once wanted to have the country tunneled because it bothered him when he wanted to go from Berlin to the Baltic Sea. Later he came to love some areas very much. Rainald Grebe sang perhaps the funniest Brandenburg song, but he lives in the Uckermark. Very few people from Brandenburg go on vacation to Berlin, even if they speak the same dialect. But when the two states were to be merged, only West Berliners were against it.
An instruction is still permitted, addressed to the people with the big stickers on their cars: Böhse Onkelz haven’t been a right-wing band for 30 years, Rammstein never were, but they are fair game. And Brandenburg is best left red. Whatever that means, it would be nice.
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