In my childhood there was barbed wire on the Czech-German border, today there are only bollards left
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Frank Richter was born near the small town of Oybin on the historic border between Lužice and Czech in 1949. Shortly thereafter, the so-called GDR, the German Democratic Republic, was established on the territory of the former Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Although it declared itself a brother state of socialist Czechoslovakia, the two countries were separated by an impenetrable border and barbed wire until the construction of the Berlin Wall, which made it much more difficult to escape from East to West across the Iron Curtain. Oybin was sealed off from the Czech borderlands, which affected Frank’s childhood as much as the poverty of post-war Germany and the many exiles from Czechoslovakia and Poland who found refuge in Oybin and the surrounding area. In the 1960s, Frank Richter, a young successful mountaineer, met a group of Czech enthusiasts who also scaled the mountains on both sides of Bohemian Switzerland. He therefore crossed the border frequently, either through a small border contact or illegally through the so-called green border. Part of these adventures included mutual aid between Czech and German sportsmen, which required smuggling this or that scarce commodity across the border. In 1989, Frank Richter took part in pro-democracy demonstrations in Zittau, and after the fall of communism he also held positions in local politics. The Czech Republic hosted each of these events in the Schengen area in 2007, which was named the most important EU member state in the EU and the most important EU member state.
