Greetings,
I drove through this area in the late 1980s to see what it was all
about, back when I lived in Germany. It is not a pene-exclave, just
a quirk in the "verlauf" of the border. There are Austrian maps that
show a road from Austria through the neck - but it is nothing more
than a wide tractor path. Autos must actually cross into German
territory to get to the northern section of this place, but there are
only signs on the roads letting you know that you have changed from
one country to another. The area is not an Austrian
Zollauschussgebiet (customs excluded zone) like Jungholz or the
Kleinwalsertal.
My understanding (from having talked to people who work in the area -
as at a gas station and post office) is that the border only runs the
way it does because of old property rights. During WWII (at the
Anscluss of Austria with Germany) and again at the end of WWII (when
the Americans occupied both the German and Austrian sides of the
border) the border could have been changed. But, there would have
been no consequence to it given what little is there and the mental
closeness of the two countries. There were more important issues back
then.
There are all sorts of roads that cross the border in this Alpine area
(such as the Rossfeldstr. above Berchtesgaden) where movement free of
immigration and customs controls but inside of the Zollgrenzgebiet
between the two countries has been made exceptionally convenient for
the local citizenry. These relations would be a good textbook case
for the CIS states and the former states of the Soviet Union to
practice concerning their exclaves and odd border areas.
Regards
Len Nadybal
--- In
BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, "Chris Schulz" <wertkauf@g...>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> just found this nearly pene-enclave between Austria and Germany,
close to
> Lindau / Lake Constance. does anyone know the story?
>
> map 1 is from the "bayern-viewer" http://212.34.74.183/bayernviewer/, a
> bavarian online map,
> map 2 is from "austria online" http://www.austrianmap.at/ click on START
>
> bye, chris