We had a very good night’s sleep and made it to breakfast closing time (by 10:30) just in time.

We took one last stroll through the old part of  Meiningen.

Having decided to take the scenic route back to Schweinfurt in Northern Bavaria, we were able to pull off the road and saw some interesting spots…

While looking up the tower and peeking over its partially walled-up entrance, I remembered a friend’s conversation. Peter, from the former East Germany, now a theatre director in Japan, had told us how he had to join the former East German military and how nearly everyone was most afraid of being placed at the border: To prevent an escape, each soldier would have to shoot his own countryman. Peter got lucky; he was not drafted into the border patrol.

This photo was taken about 20 paces away from the guard tower. In the distance you can see another white one perched atop a hill… This was a denuded stretch of No-Man’s Land, which the soldiers guarded to keep their fellow citizens from reaching the West. The neighboring hills and forests are very picturesque, and remind me a lot of the Grimms’ fairy tales. I wonder if the brothers once passed through here? Yet this area is not even the famous Thuringia forest, which lies about another hour north of Meiningen.

Thuringia is well worth another visit. It is a beautiful area in Germany, with hills and forests, friendly people and fairly low prices.

Tags: former DDR, former East German military draft, guard towers at the former border, hills in Thuringia, Meiningen

Some other posts on this topic that you might like to read:

• Visiting Meiningen in the former DDR, Day 1

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Thuringia/Germany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.