A plot of miraculous land | The Lucerne newspaper

In the middle of a dense green, Jolanda leans for a plastic wrap. His two dogs, Audra and Mėta, want to play, trying to steal the plastic from his hand. Laughing, Jolanda frightens them: "The fact that a piece of plastic in the forest is exciting and not trivial for dogs shows us how good we are here." Here it is Curonian Spit, only 100 kilometers away. a long peninsula half of which has belonged since 1945 to Lithuania and the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast and separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. Although no more than a narrow strip of land, surrounded by water – in half an hour the path of the lagoon to the trampled sea -, the Curonian Spit has always been a place that moves. It owes this to its raw nature, which fascinates visitors and locals. It is an incomparable sand landscape that is constantly reshaped by the wind.

"Nowhere in Europe have I been so far from Europe", Klaus Mann summed up in 1931 his impressions that two summers on the Curonian Spire had left him, Even his father, Thomas Mann , winner of the Nobel Prize, provoked this real and strange landscape of real storms of enthusiasm. The Manns first arrived in the Curonian Spit in 1929 and were so impressed by the miraculous location of the land that they had a wooden summer house built in the tradition of local fishermen's houses. The sight Thomas Mann had of his attic room was affectionately called "my Italian point of view."

Life lasts in the idyll of the picture book

Jolanda only understands all too well the enthusiasm for the arrow: "The nature here is so beautiful and so varied that it's not so good. it's impossible not to admire it every day. " Nobody knows better than Jolanda that life on the arrow is not just an idyll of the picture. She has spent all her life here and runs a small guest house with a gift shop in the center of Nida, the largest town on the peninsula with about 3,000 inhabitants. It is a difficult seasonal job. Because tourists come almost only in summer. "During the season, my family and I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week," she says. "It is only at the end of autumn that it will calm down again, and I have time to enjoy nature in peace." All inhabitants of Spit know this annual rhythm in two parts, directly or indirectly from tourism. This involves uncertainties and dependencies. Nevertheless, today 's life is much easier than at the time of their ancestors. These lived up to 80 years ago mainly as a fisherman. Life was barren and marked by nature, which could be as good as the ruthless.

The arrow has always been more of nature than of man. You are just a part of her here. Only once do people forget that. They almost entirely cleared the original forest and sold the wood to the shipbuilding industry. As a result, the great dunes began to migrate and buried several villages – some of them even repeated – under their masses of sand. The pines, which are close to each other here today, are immigrants from Denmark. They were planted massively from 1850 to curb the migration of the dunes and restore the natural balance. The result is a bizarre and almost mystical landscape, which the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called "the entrance to paradise" during his visit to the Curonian Spit. An offer of peace from the people to nature, which forms today the fragile base of human life on the spit and protects both sins of greater construction and mass tourism.

Suddenly, a crackle in the entrance to paradise awakens the curiosity of the two dogs. Three deer cross the path and disappear with graceful jumps between the trees. Later, a fox comes out of the twilight, turns his head briefly and continues on his way. Only a moose can be seen today. About 60 of them live on the Spit, thanks to extensive conservation, their numbers keep increasing. Although the animals are generally very shy, you can sometimes see them in the forest. But even without moose, a visit to the Curonian Spit is an experience that leaves a lasting impression. Like the "Northern Sahara", the Hohe Düne near Nida is often praised by tourists, as one feels reminded by its space of the largest desert in the world. But the comparison is soft. The constant noise of the ubiquitous Baltic Sea is too much present, the forests invaded too close to imitate a different landscape. The Prussian scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt was one of the first to understand that the Curonian Spit would not be compared but admired. He described them as "so strange that you saw them if you do not want a beautiful image in your mind."

Jolanda takes the plastic wrap from the forest, throws it in a trash can and points to the tree. ;Where is. There, the sun plunges into the Baltic Sea and transforms the sky above the arrow into a single fire of colors. At least now, any comparison is impossible.