To Saxony and Beyond: Lost in Loebau

Coming all the way from California to Germany and making Loebau your first destination (after an obligatory month with the in-laws) is, I have to admit, a rather strange thing to do. It’s a little bit like flying from Europe to California and heading straight to Modoc. It just doesn’t happen. Most Germans don’t even know where Loebau is. But I’m happy to tell you, it’s about as far east as you can go, right in the tri-corner region bordering Poland and the Czech Republic.

We’re actually not even in Loebau. Technically, we are about 5 east of Loebau, 15 minutes west of Görlitz, and a stone’s throw from the middle of nowhere. For convenience, it’s probably easier, if less accurate, to tell people we’re in Görlitz. Now Görlitz is a city that people have heard of. I’m guessing that most Germans and a fair number of Poles could even find it on a map. And if you ever saw Inglorious Basterds or The Grand Budapest Hotel, then you’ve already seen Görlitz.

The neat thing about Görlitz is its location on the border with Poland, on the Neisse River. Across the river is a Polish city called Zgorzelec, which is especially fun to pronounce after two or three pilsners. But it wasn’t until 1945, at the end of World War II, that Germany’s borders were redrawn, making the Oder and Niesse rivers the the country’s easternmost boundary. For about 8 or 900 years prior to that, Görlitz was just a modest city on the banks of an unremarkable river. It’s a bit like the opposite of the history of Budapest, which for many centuries was actually two distinct cities—Buda and Pest—on opposite banks of the Danube, until they united in the middle of the 19th century, under the glorious aegis of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

So you can see why I’m so excited to visit Görlitz. And I can’t wait to walk over the bridge to Poland and add one more country to our trip. Of course, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. For a long time I really couldn’t care less about going to Poland either. Maybe it’s all the Polish jokes I heard and retold when I was
ten or twelve years old. But I actually went through Poland in 2001 and found its Slavic charm and ancient monuments quite endearing, so much so that I returned five months later, only to discover that Warsaw in November can be a dreary uninviting city, but fascinating nonetheless.

But like I said, this corner of Germany is definitely not at the top of everyone’s must-see list. My father-in-law actually lived here for a brief time as a child, back in the gold old days of East German communism, and he made it clear to us that he has no interest ever coming back to visit. My wife’s grandmother, who perhaps watches more than a healthy amount of television, also warned us of the many atrocities she’s seen reported on the evening news from this border region. Between Saxony, Poland and the Czech Republic, it’s something like the golden triangle of east European auto theft and refugee smuggling.

Finally, our hosts here made it quite clear that we ought to be careful when driving around the countryside. On account of the massive refugee crisis that’s been happening in Germany—and once in a while gets a mention on American news—law enforcement is more than a little concerned about the flow of illegal immigrants coming from the Middle East by way of Hungary and east Europe, and random stops of suspicious characters are not unusual. And due to the fact that I have a good two months of facial scruff and all the grit the goes along with being a farm worker with only one suitcase of clothing to last a year, it’s entirely possible that I could be mistaken for one of these, how shall we say, undesirables.

But we’re not worried, our papers are all in good order, and we never leave the house without our stash of passports, six of them between the four of us (our kids are lucky enough to have two each). If however, we do run into problems, we’ll be counting on you, our dear readers, to accept the charges for the collect call from the federal prison in Berlin.

Read on: For more enchanting stories about our adventures in Germany, check out the following articles:

• The best of Thuringia
• Urban Germany: Well-oiled engine of the EU
• Turning leaves in the Fatherland
• Philosophizing in Weimar