@jon The total emptiness of so much land surrounding the largest city of the European Union is still a baffling concept to me, considering most of the old West-Germany is so polycentric with a lot of medium-sized cities.
I do have to say, the emptiness and dying towns is also a phenomenon in the most western part of Rheinland-Pfalz, but it maybe doesn't feel so much as a time warp as on the pictures here. Maybe it is because the buildings in the west are generally newer then in the east, where so many old buildings remained because the regime was much more interested in building large new living quarters then renovating or replacing the old.