ittenberge’s glory days go back to the mid-19th century when the railway came to the sleepy east German town on the Elbe. Then, because of its position halfway between Hamburg and Berlin, it had a bustling Singer sewing machine factory, a chemicals factory and a silk spinnery. Under communist rule, cut off from Hamburg and West Berlin, it began to shrink and by unification in 1990 had become a backwater. Germany’s new rulers, Helmut Kohl and later Gerhard Schroeder, saw Wittenberge as a small component in the huge task of healing the national schism. The answer, according to the cross-party consensus, was to plough hundreds of millions of euros into levelling up the east. East Germans had laboured for decades under a travel ban. Now Continue reading