No, it’s not Tuscany, and the palaces and lakes are not Bavarian. The landscape is barren, open, perhaps a little sad. The country between the Elbe and Oder rivers, the heartland of old Prussia, was never the kind of landscape that aroused a sense of longing in German hearts. You had to travel through it to get to the mundane resorts on the Baltic or the expanses of East Prussia and Masuria, to the Curonian Spit, Kaliningrad or Gdansk.

Although Brandenburg was the colonial country of „Ostelbien“ (the „Land East of the Elbe“), it was still close to Magdeburg and Halberstadt, where the German emperors had Gothic cathedrals built with Roman stone. Brandenburg lies at the intersection of two worlds: the medieval one that belongs to the west and the Prussian-Slavic one stretching to the east. Brandenburg’s heart beats somewhere between Havelberg and the Oderbruch.