Original essay written in 2014 describing changes in former East Germany since I first visited there in 1991.

“Don’t worry about the land mines,” said Holger Galonska, district forester for the former East German state of Mecklenburg. “They’ve all rusted away by now.”

“He turned the Trabant from the old border road along the Elbe River into an open field that once was a death zone. My German was good enough to understand him, which did not reassure me.

It […]