In the past, people came to look at the border. Whole bus loads ascended the wooden platform on Bundesstrasse 4 in Hohegeiss in the Harz District to risk taking a look over to the other side. The other side, that was the GDR – cordoned off by signalling fences, watchtowers and ditches. The inner-German border was one of the world’s best guarded borders. The closest place to it in the Harz District was Hohegeiss. Twenty-one years after the fall of the Wall, however, nothing remains of the barriers and the viewing platform has been dismantled. “After the political change, the fences and towers couldn’t be gotten rid of soon enough,” says Friedemann Schwarz, “and today people come here on walking tours, and many of them ask where the border used to be.” The retired teacher knows exactly where it was. Just beyond his garden fence there were warning signs: “Stop! Here is the border.” Mr. Schwarz never dared to put a foot on that no-man’s land. How could he ever have imagined that nature would be able to preserve her treasures where once the border ran. For various species, the former death strip, of all places, became a unique refuge, and from it has developed the Green Band, the first and largest nature sanctuary in united Germany.
Kai Frobel anticipated this, however, and struggled at an early stage to ensure the preservation of this 1,393-kilometre-long life-line, extending from the Baltic Sea via the Elbe, Harz and Rhön districts to the Bavarian-Saxon Vogtland district. “Long before the political change, we knew what a valuable ecological jewel had formed here on the quiet,” says the initiator and head of the Green Band project at BUND, the German branch of Friends of the Earth. He explored the Bavarian-Thuringian border area, first as a youthful hobby ornithologist, then as a young scientist, charting rare bird species. Later inventories indicated that many endangered animal and plant species had availed themselves of the forcibly quietened border area as a last refuge. Be it beavers in the meadows of the Elbe valley or eagles in Altmark, wild cats in the Harz or black grouse in Frankenwald, “more than 600 endangered species were found in the Green Band,” says Frobel, “and although we were overjoyed about the border being open, we quickly realized just how threatened this area would be by future residential and road building projects.”
Only four weeks after the fall of the Wall, 400 environmentalists from East and West publicized a demand for an unbroken area to be protected. The idea for the Green Band initially took shape in Hof, in Bavaria. Now the project is a success story. Today 85% of the total 177 square kilometres of the Green Band are regarded as “nearly natural” – in other words, not built on or crossed by roads. The environmentalist group is trying to close any existing gaps by using donated funds to buy up stretches of land, as it succeeded in doing with the Brietzer Lakes in Altmark near Salzwedel. The flooded clay quarries near the last fen woods in Saxony-Anhalt, including wet meadows and peat bogs, are among the region’s ecological treasures.
It may well seem like a particular irony of history that the artificially maintained aisles once intended to guarantee GDR border guards an open field of fire have often developed into particularly valuable biotopes. “In order to preserve this biodiversity in the future, one of the main tasks will be to care for and maintain the Green Band,” says Hubert Weiger of BUND. This is a task which is meantime forging links between many different actors, from the German Federal Government, the Länder and local communities. As a lighthouse-project in the national strategy for biological diversity, this narrow strip of land, only 50 to 200 metres wide in its core area, also has another major function: “Because the Green Band links 109 different types of habitat to form the longest biotope system in Germany, it serves as an ecological ‘backbone’ for the wider networking of landscapes and habitats.” This is how Beate Jessel, president of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), explains the objective of the large state-promoted nature conservation projects. Networking is important to secure the survival of endangered species and of species that have been returned to the wilds, such as the lynx in the Harz district.
If the border had not existed, the river Elbe would also have lost one of its most unique and beautiful stretches. For 40 years, the Elbe valley meadows between Brandenburg and Lower Saxony were spared channelling measures, so that one of the last nearly natural river landscapes has been preserved, where storks find sufficient food and beavers can build their dams and lodges without interference. “For nature, the border was a blessing, for the people in the GDR it was a curse,” say Margot and Wolfgang Pauli. “Surviving in the Prohibited Zone” is the title of the exhibition which they are presenting in the Elbe village of Unbesandten, in the barn of their farmhouse which they restored after reunification. The aim of “Experience the Green Band”, a tourism project jointly supported by BfN and BUND, is to preserve the unique quality of this landscape as a vital part of the natural heritage and to make it more easily accessible. Today, old GDR watchtowers are used as venues for exhibitions or as vantage points for sightseers, cycling tours include forcefully evacuated villages as reminders of what the border area was like, and walking routes have been established along paths where GDR soldiers used to patrol.
Parallel to this, the Green Band is being constantly extended. After all, the Iron Curtain was a refuge for nature all over Europe, so that a chain of habitats worthy of protection stretches from the Polar Sea to the Aegean and on to the Black Sea. The Green Band links 23 countries over 12,500 kilometres – in keeping with the motto “Nature recognizes no borders” and as a prime example of how a vision of nature conservation can lead to international understanding.////
