The name is Low German for 'wöst' - uninhabitable. During the Ice Age, the whole valley was a fen, the kind of waterlogged ground that defeated 18th-century efforts to graze cattle on it. Even the Pappelgraben, a drainage channel dug between 1781 and 1784, couldn't quite get the water out. The district stayed agriculturally marginal until 1843, when Osnabrück began tearing down its medieval fortifications. Suddenly the city needed building land, and tearing down stone walls created exactly what the fen lacked: dry earth, in millions of cartloads, ready to be tipped into the bog. From the early 20th century onward they kept tipping - household waste, slag, ashes, rubble - because the Wüste would absorb anything you threw at it. Then in the 1990s they discovered what that meant.

When construction crews started turning up unusual substances in early-1990s excavations, soil investigators followed up. They found 270 hectares contaminated with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, lead, cadmium, barium, copper and zinc - a chemical inventory of a century's worth of urban waste. Of 1,700 residential properties tested, 218 exceeded federal soil protection thresholds. Wüste briefly became one of the largest contaminated sites in Germany, a 270-hectare reminder that filling in a fen with whatever was lying around had downstream costs. Between 2006 and 2008, the city remediated more than 70 plots in three phases. The municipal government covered the cleanup; homeowners had to pay to restore their gardens. The neighborhood emerged on the other side as residential as ever - the Wüstlinge, the libertines, as some residents jokingly call themselves, were apparently undeterred.

There is also a saying: Moskau liegt in der Wüste - Moscow lies in the Wüste. Outsiders smile at the geography until you explain. The Moskaubad, opened in 1926, is a combined indoor-outdoor public swimming pool in the heart of the district, colloquially shortened to simply Moskau. Locals further claim that Osnabrück is the largest city in the world, because it stretches all the way from Wüste to Moscow. This is the kind of pun-deep civic humor that Westphalians treat as a serious export - the joke isn't really at Moscow's expense; it's at the expense of anyone who takes place names too literally. The Moskaubad still operates today, an Art Deco shadow of the early 20th century preserved by the unusual logic of being the Moscow that one drives ten minutes to reach.

The two largest waters in Wüste today are both inventions. The Wüstensee was built on Schreberstraße in 1975-76, a rainwater retention basin doubling as a neighborhood lake. The Pappelsee followed in the next decade along Am Pappelgrabben, deliberately designed with close-to-nature ambience - reedy edges, irregular shoreline, room for ducks. The poplars that gave the Pappelgraben its name were planted in 1829, the year the channel got its current shape. Walk the path between the two lakes today and you walk across an Ice Age fen that 18th-century engineers couldn't drain, a 19th-century landfill the city ran on its own walls, a 20th-century contamination map, and a 21st-century cleanup - all flattened into a leafy neighborhood the Spiegel's readers thought too absurd to be real.