Eastern Germany

My partner and I are planing to go to Germany in late August/ early September. We want to go to East and North East Germany rather than the typical tourist areas. Are there any suggestions for thing not to be missed in the Leipzig, Chemnitz, area? Dresden and Berlin are on the list already. (Nordhausen is on the list for personal reasons.) What about Zingst? Not asking about specifically "Gay" life. Though Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's Gruenderzeit museum is on the list.

Ko-Ko
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• Meet me in the Cafe Friedrichstrasse.

  Sasha%20Banacek

• DDR Museum in Berlin: not to be missed. If you have any interest in Luther, Lutherstadt Wittenberg is interesting. They have a little museum where they've decorated rooms in different decades - a 1910 room, 1920 room, etc. Most of the old remnants of the former DDR are gone, sad to say. Perhaps less so in the smaller towns.

• Thanks R3. Lutherstadt Wittenberg sound like something to see.

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• Surely someone has been to Zingst?

• Consider the Spreewald:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spreewald

• Leipzig is a pretty old-fashioned college town. Dresden recently rebuilt. around Potsdam is pretty with lakes.

• The Spreewald looks like a great place to visit. Will we be frustrated with only about two days there? We are going to have a car. Mt partner and went to Dresden the year the Frauenkirche was opened after being rebuilt. We had such a good time and found the locals so appreciative that Americans would visit their area rather than the typical Munich, Nuernberg, Regensburg, area, that we decided to see more of the East and North.

• The Baltic beaches in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are beautiful, particularly Hiddensee (no cars!), Rügen, and Usedom.

• I still think it would be better to spend a few days at the Mediterranenean or at the Southern French Atlantic Coast as well, besides East Germany, it would make the trip more holidayish. I don't know much about East German attractions, but I find the 'Lonely Planet Germany' a good guidebook, probably not that much for you, but as an additional read it would help you. Taking the train, IC, EC, City Nightline and ICE, is quite atmospheric (ICE not much, but it is the fastest). Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin is a lively, young area, Rügen has good beaches. Weimar ("Weimarer Klassik")

  German

• It's great -- if you are white.

• I've been to Berlin and Kiel, which is on the Baltic coast - it's a very different kind of coastline than the Atlantic or Pacific - it may be cold, too. (Duh.) R12, Germans LOVE Black Americans, and of course, lots of Turks live in Germany, so not sure what your quip is about.

• Eastern Germany, r13. It's where most of the neo-Nazis now reside.

• Okay, but I guess I see that as much of a problem for them as the KKK would be in places like Tennessee or Kentucky.

• I've been to Dresden and Berlin and had a great time. As R13 pointed out, there is a neonazi element among the disenfranchised youth in what used to be DDR. There's probably no need to venture far into the Eastern suburbs of Berlin but if you do, avoid groups of young men who look sketchy. They've been known to beat up Turkish immigrants and non-whites in general and are probably not very gay friendly either. However, there's no need to feel particularly unsafe in Berlin itself and people in Dresden were very friendly even though they sometimes struggled with English (the ones who were old enough to go through the old East german school system.)

• Get in touch with Hedwig's people.

• Erfurt is a great little medieval town to visit where some of the houses are built directly into bridges.

• R16, we are going to struggle with out poor German unless otherwise instructed. Again, the people of Dresden seemed quite please that we attempted to speak German, though I totally messed up the noun drink and the verb to drink. somehow, they figured it out.