Two remains of the former wall that separated a German and a Dutch border town, symbolic of what once was. Photos: Oliver Berg/dpa
There are streets in Europe that run from one country to the other - or where the houses on one side of the street are in one nation, and the others in another.
One such street lies on the Dutch-German border.
One side of the street has odd numbers. On the other side, the houses have even and odd numbers.
On one side of the street, the windows have curtains, but not on the other.
On one side there are cars with white license plates in front of the doors, while the cars outside the houses across the road have yellow plates.
The street, too, has different names – on one side it is called Neustrasse, on the other Nieuwstraat.
The border between Germany and the Netherlands runs down the centre of the street, dividing the people between the town of Herzogenrath, and of Kerkrade.
Despite sharing a border, Germans and Dutch people have an age-old rivalry that plays out these days in sports.
“There’s a little wall on the traffic island at the back that reminds us that it used to be different here,” says postman Michael Hanek, who delivers the post on the German side.
There used to be a knee-high border in the centre of the street, nicknamed the “Berlin Wall”. Anyone who jumped over it and was caught had to pay an official fine of 20 marks (about RM52).
Fadavian stands behind two painted relics of a former ‘Berlin Wall’ that separated his village with Kerkrade on the Dutch side.
(The German mark, or Deutsche Mark, was the currency used in Germany before it was replaced by the euro.)
When the German national football team and Dutch team played each other, there were sometimes brawls at the wall between opposing fans who came to the area specially to riot.
Locals from Herzogenrath and Kerkrader would then stand at a safe distance, shaking their heads.
The small border wall is history, too, torn down in by a construction crew sometime in 1993.
German grandmothers
“We weren’t separated until 1815, when we were one town,” the mayor of Kerkrade, Petra Dassen, said over a kopje koffie or cup of coffee in Kerkrade’s town hall, a building which looks smart and old from the outside and bright and modern on the inside.
“But then the Congress of Vienna drew the border here, and suddenly families were torn apart. One half was suddenly Dutch, the other German. Here in Kerkrade today, there is still hardly a resident who doesn’t have a German grandmother or a German great-uncle,” she says.
It’s the same the other way round.
“I have an incredible number of Dutch friends,” says the mayor of Herzogenrath, Benjamin Fadavian. “We have many family relationships, marriages between members of both countries – that’s normal here.
“Many speak both languages and identify with both countries.
“They cheered on both teams at the European Football Championships. I, for example, keep my fingers crossed for the Germans and the Dutch and am happy about every Dutch victory.”
At home, he always has Vla in the fridge, a special kind of Dutch dessert.
Left points to Germany and right points to the Netherlands as seen in the German-Dutch border towns of Herzogenrath and Kerkrade.
Toilet divisions
The two cities have gradually grown closer together over the past decades – and have even given themselves a common name: Eurode.
The fire brigade has developed a hose coupling that fits fire engines from both countries.
Anyone who is a member of the Kerkrade public library can automatically borrow books in Herzogenrath and vice versa.
The Eurode Business Centre even stands in the middle of the national border: the men’s toilet is in Germany, the women’s toilet in the Netherlands.
“The Dutch are more relaxed in their dealings, people say ‘du’ straight away,” says Stephanie van den Berg-Thoenniben, referring to the informal way of saying “you”.
She should know, as she is married to a Dutchman.
As an employee of the city of Herzogenrath, she advises companies that are active in the German-Dutch border region.
Her desk in the Eurode Business Centre is directly adjacent to that of her Dutch colleague Cor Chudy from the city of Kerkrade.
He is convinced: “The European Union is being realised here with us and not in Brussels or anywhere else.”
Border revival
For many of the almost 100,000 inhabitants of Herzogenrath and Kerkrade, the shared living space has become so natural that they are barely aware of the border.
Where exactly it runs is often only known to local historian Peter Dinninghoff, who is currently working on a Dutch-German history trail.
But the pandemic made that brutally clear – as the border reappeared what felt like overnight.
“Suddenly we were told that you were only allowed to cross with an important reason, for work or with a special permit,” says van den Berg-Thoenniben.
You needed a negative coronavirus test. But there was no test centre in Kerkrade, so the residents of Kerkrade first had to travel to the next largest city, Maastricht, to get tested – which cost around US$30 (RM132) per trip.
“That was of course a huge expense,” says van den Berg-Thoenniben. “There was an outcry here, people called crying: ‘I can no longer look after my parents – I have to cross the border’.”
Then the two town mayors got together with the aim of opening a test centre that would also be accessible to the people of Kerkrade. And so it came to be – in the car park of the Eurode Business Centre.
European test laboratory
This pragmatic cooperation is met de paplepel ingegoten, as the Dutch say: they have absorbed it with their mother’s milk.
Nevertheless, there is some frustration on both sides.
“We are now at the point where we are saying: we are not getting anywhere,” says Mayor Dassen.
“Of course, we are continuing what we already have with love and commitment, but we are not taking the decisive step towards achieving the next level of integration. For example, by officially setting up a bilingual daycare centre. We have investigated this, but it is not possible, national laws do not allow it. It has to do with professional qualifications,” she says.
So she and her German colleague Fadavian came up with the idea of applying to the European Union for the status of a cross-border European twin city.
“So that you suspend national laws to a certain extent in order to test whether it works?”
As far as she knows, this would be the first initiative of its kind within the EU.
“We envisage our two cities as a European test laboratory,” says Fadavian, outlining the plan.
If it works as they hope, the two cities on the edge of their respective countries would suddenly become the centre of attention.
They would then become the European avant-garde.
“We definitely want to present something within the next year,” says Dassen. “And then we’ll have to see if we’re successful.” – dpa
