Borderlines

Today I visited three smaller cities in Saxony: Bautzen, Görlitz and Zittau. I also walked into Poland, but more on that below...

My first stop was Bautzen, about an hour east of Dresden by train. This is the main city of the Sorbs, a slavic minority that has long lived in eastern Germany.

All of the official signs are in both German and Sorbian (which looked to me  like Polish or Slovak), and this lends a hint of exoticism to what is otherwise a very picturesque small city.

There are medieval towers, narrow streets with well-preserved Baroque buildings, and a very strange church. It's a Simultankirche, which is "simultaneously" used by both Protestants and Catholics. The former have the nave and the latter the (more ornate, of course) choir, and the two parts are separated by a low iron partition. I never knew such a thing even existed; it's been this way since the Reformation in the 16th century.

I then traveled further east -- about another 40 minutes -- to the lovely, intact medieval city of Görlitz. This is the end of the line, as it were, since the city has been politically divided by the Neiße River since the 1945 Potsdam Treaty, with the old town remaining in Germany and the suburbs awarded to Poland (the Polish side is called Zgorzelec). 

You can actually walk across a small footbridge -- the river here is not much more than a large stream -- to cross the border, as I did. The only formalities consist of two friendly border guards, one German and one Polish, standing on the Polish side, to whom you show your passport.

One thing I did not expect -- back on the German side -- is the active pining for German territories lost, primarily to a shifted-westward Poland, after WWII. If the bookstore I visited in Görlitz was any indication, this is quite a cottage industry, with literally dozens of books plus calendars, flags, posters, beer coasters etc. united by the exhortation "eine Heimat" (one homeland) with reference to East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania -- and even the Sudetenland. Part of it is undoubtedly driven by nostalgia for places such as Breslau (now Wroclaw), Danzig (now Gdansk), Königsburg (now Kaliningrad and actually part of the Russian Federation) and Stettin (now Szczecin), which were mostly ravaged during the war and the German populations expelled thereafter. But part of it also seems to involve revanchist fantasies which, when coupled with small-but-growing right-wing extremism in Saxony, could portend a darker aspect as well.

My final stop was the pretty but sleepy city of Zittau, situated in the so-called Dreiländereck "Deutschland - Polen - Tschechien" (literally, "three-country corner of Germany, Poland and Czechia"). Maybe it was because it was Sunday, but this town struck me as somewhat pokey, and some of its grand, monumental buildings from a prominence long since passed seemed a little out of place now. The main attraction, which I was not able to experience since it was too late in the day, looked to be the antique, narrow-gauge Bimmelbahn steam railway, which runs up into the Zittau Mountains. It was a good thing I had my passport with me, though: when I boarded the train back to Dresden, both German and Czech police were checking everyone's papers