The Hindu : International : A landmark tumbles into the sea

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Sunday, Feb 27, 2005

International

International

A landmark tumbles into the sea

Berlin: One of Germany's most famous landscapes, immortalised by the painter Caspar David Friedrich, has disappeared after a large chunk of white cliff fell into the sea. The jagged chalk cliffs on Rugen, Germany's largest island on its northern coast, have long attracted a stream of visitors and holidaymakers. But tourist officials discovered on Friday that the Wissower Klinken, a well-known landmark, had vanished. Some 50,000 cubic metres of chalk had slithered into the sea. Instead of vertiginous romantic peaks, the white cliffs on the eastern side of the island were now entirely flat. ``This is the first time an important landmark has vanished,'' Claudia Leppin, a spokeswoman for Rugen's tourist board, said on Friday. ``It's not as if we can rebuild it because the cliff is in a protected national park. Of course we are going to miss it, but we still have plenty of beautiful landscape left. The cliffs are very porous and we have problems like this every year.'' Friedrich, Germany's most celebrated Romantic landscape painter, recorded the view in the early 19th century. The lost cliff features prominently in tourist brochures on the island, which are visited by tens of thousands of mostly German tourists every year. Luminaries who have been attracted by Rugen's rugged, windswept landscape have included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Otto von Bismark. The cliffs off Germany's Baltic coast were formed during the last ice age, and are vulnerable to landslides in spring during thaws. —

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