“If they are capable and dependable, they are in.”
I meet the owner Sebastian Wehland who brings a friend (a fireman from the Kerkwitz branch) and a few bottles of beer. We sit in his beautiful but abandoned beer garden as he tells me about his grandparents Gisela and Günther who ran the place for half a century. Now their grandson, who has returned with his young family after years spent living in western Germany, finds it difficult to get this village institution back up on its feet. Converting the pub into holiday flats seemed the only viable solution. But Wehland tries to open the place twice a year for the traditional spring festivals, determined not to “allow the Dorfkrug to disappear from Kerkwitz.”
“Is this sort of decline the reason why you have so many AfD voters here?” I ask the two young men. It’s gone dark and not a single sound fills the warm night air. “Well, there is a sense that some of the traditions here are lost,” says Wehland’s friend, who doesn’t want to be named. “We used to have a lively club here for those of us breeding pigeons, chickens and rabbits as a hobby. Now that’s as good as dead.”
