
Traces of East Germany: Wall, Bunkers, Wilderness
Along the former inner-German border in Saxony-Anhalt, watchtowers and patrol paths vanished after 1989 and nature took over a strip of land now known as the Green Belt, a protected wilderness stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Vogtland region. This film travels the old frontier between Altmark and Oberharz, talking to residents in the villages that once sat in its shadow. Many of them, especially those born around the time the Wall fell, are now working to preserve what remains of the border rather than erase it: overgrown bunkers, rusted fence lines, guard towers reclaimed by forest. Local history projects, restored watchtowers, and firsthand accounts trace how a barrier people once wanted gone has become a site of memory and even tourism. The film asks why interest in this landscape is growing now, three decades after reunification, and finds its answer in the generation that never lived with the border but has inherited the job of remembering it.