Wüste Mark

[lethargic_man]

Why is there a field here, surrounded on all sides by the Parforceheide forest a bit under a mile outside of the Berlin city boundary?

Answer: This is Wüste Mark (Waste March), which name apparently indicates it is the site of an abandoned village. There was a village called Gerhardsdorf here (or possibly somewhere else nearby with a similar name) in the Middle Ages; possibly it was wiped out by the Black Death.

In the 1910s, an organisation called the Zweckverband Groß-Berlin bought up large amounts of forests and open space around Berlin so that the growing city should have green spaces available in perpetuity to its inhabitants; for reasons I do not understand, Wüste Mark was included in this, even though the surrounding land was not. When in 1920 the city borders were greatly expanded, Wüste Mark became an exclave of the city.

You can probably guess where this is going, now: When the city was divided, this ended up as an exclave of West Berlin surrounded by East Berlin. There were quite a few of these; I already posted about the village of Steinstücken, for which a road corridor was created in a deal between East and West Berlin; Wüste Mark is the closest uninhabited one to me.

In 1959 a West Berlin farmer called Hans Wendt rented the land, and got special permission to drive his tractor through the Checkpoint Bravo border control on the motorway to farm the land.

In 1988 another land deal was done, which transferred Wüste Mark and two other exclaves to East Berlin. Astonishingly, Wendt was not informed of this, but he died shortly afterwards anyway.

The irony is that though no miniature Berlin Wall was erected around the field (because it was uninhabited), when I went to have a look on Monday I found it surrounded by an electric fence (presumably to stop people trampling on the crops).