damp and blustery part of the formerly communist East, seemed an unlikely place for a weekend getaway to cosmopolitan Berliner Elena Stein. And she still marvels that the tiny hamlet turned out to be a place where she’d buy a dark and ramshackle 19th-century farmhouse and remake it into an airy family retreat equipped with state-of-the-art sustainable heating and power systems. Three decades after German reunification, this sparsely populated rural area in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern can feel out of the way and frozen in time. But for Stein, her husband, Roland, and their teenage children, Alicia, David, and Frederik, this land of storks and cranes and water and wind has become special to them precisely
