A guide to Eastern Germany
By: James Bentley.
Publisher: Viking
Published: 1993
Place of publication: London; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 243
Subjects: Germany (East) -- Guidebooks
Description: For nearly half a century most of eastern Germany was a closed region to travellers from the west, blocked off by the Iron Curtain. Today, after German reunification, its superb cities and towns, its exquisite countryside dotted with lakes and charming villages, are once more open to the rest of the world. In James Bentley's A Guide to Eastern Germany no part of this delightful land is left unexplored.

His authoritative guide comprehensively describes the great and celebrated cities of the region, such as Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, as well as many other equally entrancing ones, such as Schwerin and Wittenberg, Erfurt and Weimar, Frederick the Great's Potsdam and the porcelain town of Meissen. His tours blend history and anecdote. He evokes the ghosts of the past: among the writers, Goethe, Schiller, Martin Luther and Heinrich Heine; among the artists, Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Durer, Caspar David Friedrich and Otto Dix; among the rulers, the Great Elector and Augustus the Strong of Saxony, who turned Catholic in order to become King of Poland.

James Bentley takes the reader through the forests of the Harz mountains, beside the lakes of Mecklenburg, among the rock climbs of Saxony Switzerland and, a reminder of Germany's grimmer past, into the Nazi concentration camps. His pages include seaside resorts, nature reserves and bustling German taverns. Travellers can here savour in advance the varied food and drink of eastern Germany, a region of both beer and wine as well as extremely hearty food.

Among out-of-the-way and unexpected delight A Guide to Eastern Germany explores such tiny villages as Bad Doberan, with its astonishing monastic church, the country of the Sorabes, where some hundred thousand people speak their own Slavic language as well as German, and the secluded islands of the Baltic coast. If you relish unspoilt villages with half-timbered houses and hotels, if you wish to be punted in a leisurely fashion along the streams of the Spreewald, if you would like to eat in a floating hotel on the River Elbe, if you appreciate soaring Gothic cathedrals and churches as well as medieval fortresses and baroque palaces, this guidebook is an essential aid.
Notes: Includes index.