The first time I visited the so-called Holstein Switzerland, the region between Eutin, Plön and Malente, I thought I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. What I saw was a hilly landscape whose woods and fields radiated a gentleness and peace that I simply could not tally with the roughness and flatness of the rest of Schleswig-Holstein. But that’s the way things are in this state: varied and ever new.

When I ask myself, as an incomer, why I like living here, then the reasons that first occur to me would seem to speak against it. The wind is stronger and more constant here than elsewhere, the rain more frequent and the temperatures on average lower, the distances are greater and the peripheral location in Germany makes trips to the west and south long. But that is all part of what makes it unique. And when I stand at the sea and watch the sun going down in the evening, everything else is forgotten anyway.