The turn at the B 248
Regina Rathje likes to remember the summers of her childhood: at that time she was playing catch-up with her siblings, they built an impromptu shop next to the milk bank, which is located in front of the gate of her parents' house. There was no sound except the raging children and chatting adults. There was silence in Jameln, a small village in the east of Lower Saxony near the border to the former GDR.
About 45 years later, Regina Rathje, 54, is sitting at a massive wooden table in her living room with her husband Günter and her youngest son Henning. In the background you hear the muffled noise of fast moving cars from the outside. They remember old family stories that took place here in the house. It is the building in which Regina Rathje was born, in which she married her husband very pregnant and in which she raised her three children. She has spent practically her entire life here.
The highway led to nowhere
The house of the family in 1955: pure nature, no trace of cars.
The 120 square meter red clinker was built in 1954. Regina's father Paul wanted to create a home for his family: his wife and six children. It took about a year for the skilled carpenter to complete the house together with two friendly craftsmen. Directly on the B 248. The highway then led into nowhere: its end formed the Elbe - a dead end. There was no bridge to the other shore, they had been demolished, because behind them lay the GDR. Accordingly, cars rarely came here.
Regina Rathje reports on cycling trips that ended in her childhood on the border: "You could look over, but there was nothing to see, there were no villages, only forest." The Vopos, the people's police, came to us quickly wegschickten. " Even in the memories of her son Henning, now 33 years old, bicycles play a role: "If we played earlier in the village, we are always just with the mountain bikes across the street, without looking." There might be times every 20 minutes Tractor. " Today you wait ten, in real time up to four minutes, until you can cross the highway, adds Günter.
The former landlord Paul with his wife and grandson in the garden (1972): With the fall of the Berlin Wall came also for the family the turning point.
With the fall of the Wall came the turning point for the family on the west side of the B 248? insidious, but steady. Twenty-one years ago, in November twenty-one years ago, when they watched the event together on television, no one in the family thought that they, too, would be affected on the west wall. On the contrary, they were like most euphoric, drove three days after the opening of the border with her white cadet in the former GDR. Your destination: the city of Salzwedel in Saxony-Anhalt. "That was pretty scary for me back then," Regina Rathje says smiling. "You did not even know what was over there, we were always sent away as children."
The changes were noticeable within a few months even in direct everyday surroundings. On Wednesdays, when there were the special offers, a visit to ALDI was impossible: "In three rows, the East Germans were at the door." There were no shopping carts at seven in the morning, "says Günter.
"Stink bombs" suddenly puffed up the air
The red clinker today: An estimated 200 to 300 trucks board the house every day.
Also the traffic on the B 248 became ever denser. Especially Trabbis, "the stink bombs", as Regina calls them, now often flit past the house. Also truck drivers discovered the distance from the north of Lower Saxony in the direction of Salzwedel, Magdeburg and Berlin for themselves - particularly after introduction of the toll. An estimated 200 to 300 trucks board the house daily. Because this is only 15 meters behind the town sign, most race at 70 km / h on the clock over. Then the whole red clinker wobbles from the vibrations of the trucks. It is almost impossible to sit and talk in the once peaceful garden.
Nevertheless, Regina and Günter do not want to move away. In recent decades, they have set up a nice home here. Even the car noise the two barely hear. And: Slowly, the couple approaches an age in which the hearing subsides. Then it is at the federal highway 248 sometime quiet again.
