Brandenburg an der Havel
My home town 1957-1975

There are four streets in Brandenburg that are important to me. Two of them, because that is where life happened back then, the other two, because I used to live there.

	Hauptstraße is Brandenburg's Main Street (actually, that is what the name means). It crosses river Havel and connects Old Town and New Town.		Steinstraße (or Boulder Street) was the first street in historic Brandenburg that got bouldered. In the back is the Steintorturm (or Boulder Gate Tower).

			Here I spent the first seven years of my life. Back then, the buildings didn't look as pretty as they do now but rather like the buildings underneath. The town still recovers from communist mismanagement, Russian occupation and a war that ended 60 years ago. Only two blocks away, one can still admire machine gun - bullet holes from the last fighting's in 1945.
	Bullet holes in the wall - still, 60 years after the war.		Russian military cemetery

From 1964 through 1975, I lived in one of these "splendiferous" appartment building made of precast concrete slabs. The buildings were standardized and could be found all over East Germany.

And here is the school I graduated from in 1974. It was as standardized as the apartment buildings (and as standardized as the entire East german school system). Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun there.

Here is what I like most about Brandenburg: The green and blue in the town's flag stand for trees and water. and there is lot of both in and around Brandenburg. (also, there is lots of sand, represented by the white color in the flag.) Underneath are a couple of pictures of Marienberg, a mountain in the center of the city and Beetssee, one of the many lakes surrounding the town.

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