Qualla: Feldberg Lake District Nature Park

Feldberg Lake District Nature Park: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maik Schallge, CC BY-SA 2.5. Rudolf Ditzen moved to a farmhouse above the Carwitzer See in 1933 and stayed eleven years. He wrote under the name Hans Fallada, and in September 1935 the regime declared him an undesirable author, a designation that banned his work. His British publisher arranged a way out of Germany. He said he could not leave. So he remained here, among lakes the ice age scooped out and never quite drained, on a piece of ground where the water outnumbers the villages. The house still stands above the same reeds. There is something disorienting about a landscape this quiet being, for one man, the place he chose over escape.

Image: Maik Schallge | CC BY-SA 2.5

Feldberg Lake District Nature Park: The Writer Who Would Not Leave

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lencer, CC BY-SA 3.0. Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen was already famous when he came to Carwitz, and the fame was becoming a liability. He wrote through the ban, through the surveillance, through years in which almost every choice available to him was a bad one. In 1944 a drunken altercation with his...

Image: Lencer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Feldberg Lake District Nature Park: What the Ice Left Behind

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrice77, CC BY-SA 3.0. Everything here is the work of a glacier that has been gone for around twelve thousand years. Terminal moraines ridge the north of the park; the south is wooded sandur, the flat sand plain that meltwater laid down as it ran off the ice. The central lakes belong to the terminal mo...

Image: Patrice77 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Feldberg Lake District Nature Park: Three Hundred and Fifty Years Without an Axe

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leonhard Lenz, CC0. The stand of beech called the Heilige Hallen - the Holy Halls - is the reason foresters come here from other countries. In the middle of the nineteenth century Grand Duke George of Strelitz saw the columnar trunks and ordered that the wood be left alone, an instruction that has l...

Image: Leonhard Lenz | CC0

Feldberg Lake District Nature Park: The Otter on the Coat of Arms

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christian Thiele, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. The park chose the otter for its emblem, which tells you what kind of place it considers itself to be. Black storks nest in the older woods. Ospreys, lesser spotted eagles and white-tailed eagles work the lakes, and the water holds whitefish and the swollen river mussel, a specie...

Image: Christian Thiele | CC BY-SA 2.0 de

Feldberg Lake District Nature Park: A Border Under the Water

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Marcela assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The park runs to about 340 square kilometres, and the arithmetic is honest about what it is: 38 percent woodland, 11 percent lake and river, 45 percent farmed, the remainder roads and houses. This is a cultural landscape with protected pieces inside it rather than a park with far...

Image: No machine-readable author provided. Marcela assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0