Like a single town: Kerkrade and Herzogenrath
From the air you can only see one town: the inhabitants have made the German-Dutch border almost invisible.
What kind of street is this? On one side it has only odd house numbers, on the other both even and odd. The windows have curtains on one side and not on the other. The cars have white licence plates on one side and yellow ones on the other. On one side it is called Neustrasse, on the other Nieuwstraat. On this road, the border between Germany and the Netherlands runs right down the centre. One side belongs to the German town of Herzogenrath, the other to Kerkrade. A small wall on a traffic island reminds us that things haven’t always been that easy, says the postman on the German side, Michael Hanek. Up until 1993, the road was divided by a knee-high wall down the middle: anyone who jumped over it had to pay a fine of 20 Deutschmarks.
“Before 1815 we weren’t separated at all, we were one town,” says the mayor of Kerkrade, Petra Dassen. “But then the Congress of Vienna drew the border here, and suddenly families were torn apart. Here in Kerkrade today, there’s still hardly a resident who doesn’t have a German grandmother or a German great-uncle.” The situation is similar the other way round, too. “I have a huge number of Dutch friends,” says the mayor of Herzogenrath, Benjamin Fadavian.
Eurode – the name of the cross-border city
Step by step, the two cities have grown closer and closer together – and they’ve even given themselves a single name: Eurode, the first European twin city. The fire service has developed a hose coupling that fits fire engines in both countries. If you are a member of a public library, you can borrow books on the other side of the town, too. The Eurode Business Center was even built so that it straddles the border directly: the men’s toilets are in Germany, the women’s are in the Netherlands.
So a lot of the almost 100,000 inhabitants of Herzogenrath and Kerkrade are hardly aware there is a border there at all. There are bureaucratic limits to further integration, however. A joint day care centre is not possible: the respective national rules are incompatible. To get round this, the cities are going to apply to the European Union for the status of a cross-border European twin city. “We envision our two towns as a European test laboratory,” says Fadavian. (dpa)
