TV tower / Fernsehturm

The skyline of historic Greifswald is dominated by impressive medieval churches. But our daily cycle with my son to nursery takes us in the other direction, guided by this unmissable landmark.

I find it rather sinister: we are in the former East Germany, where towers were built to spy on the people and block them from hearing news from the “free west“.

Or maybe I got that all wrong? For such an imposing structure there is very little about it on the web, but apparently it was built not in the 1960’s but the 1990‘s, not by the Stasi but by Deutsche Bundespost Telekom - and it‘s not a source of repression but of civic pride. In fact it’s not even a tv tower, but rather a ‘transmitter‘.