Pia Volk: Deutschlands schrägste Orte/Germany's strangest places

Professor Shih-Yu Chuang talks about Pia Volk's ‘Deutschlands schrägste Orte’.

Everything measured, discovered, known – are there still places in Germany that inspire awe and wonder? Geographer and journalist Pia Volk took a look around between the Wadden Sea and the Allgäu, between the banks of the Main in Frankfurt and the Sorbs region, and came across all sorts of strange and bizarre places: an oak tree with its own address, a washed-away Atlantis in the North Sea, a chandelier in Cologne's sewer system, the last remaining border lock for agents from the Soviet zone. Pia Volk has walked along a path that leads across the grounds of a nuclear power plant and crossed a military training area on her way to mighty tombs that no one knows how they were built. She jumped over a rock landscape riddled with cavities where all the water disappears, and had someone explain to her how a church tower can be used to deduce what is probably the most gigantic event in German geological history. She listened to Sorbian fairy tales, Sater Frisian proverbs and sounds that last for years. She reports on all these bizarre landscapes, eccentric worlds and obscure objects in her book. In an exciting and entertaining way, she leads us to geographical and historical curiosities and teaches us to see Germany with new eyes.

The book is not a travel guide, but rather a collection of exciting stories and interesting traditions. Shih-Yu Chang, a scholar in the field of German as a foreign language, has visited some of the places mentioned in the book.