Riems

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Riems
View of the island, the remains of the foundations of the old cable car in the water
View of the island, the remains of the foundations of the old cable car in the water
Waters Greifswalder Bodden
Geographical location 54 ° 10 '59 "  N , 13 ° 21' 50"  E Coordinates: 54 ° 10 '59 "  N , 13 ° 21' 50"  E
Riems (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania)
Riems
length 1.25 km
width 300 m

The island of Riems is located in the southwest of the Greifswalder Bodden , a flat spur of the Baltic Sea between the mainland and the island of Rügen .

Under administrative law, Riems belongs to the urban area of ​​the Hanseatic City of Greifswald , but it is an exclave . In addition to the island of Riems, it also includes Riemserort, a district that lies opposite the island on the mainland.

There has been a virological research facility on the island since 1910, the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut , which primarily studies animal diseases. For this reason, large parts of the island have been declared a restricted area.

geography

The island of Riems measures around 1,250 meters in a west-east orientation and around 300 meters from north to south at its widest point. It was connected to the mainland in the early 1970s by an approximately 500-meter-long heaped road embankment. Before that, there was a cable car to the mainland from 1926 to 1972 for the transport of materials , of which two foundations of former cable car supports still exist. After the lack of fresh water in the Gristower Wiek had led to a shortage of oxygen in the shallow bay, the dam to the island was reopened in autumn 2007 over a length of 30 meters.

fauna

Riems is located in an important resting and moulting area for water birds. The Fahrbrink peninsula is designated as a nature reserve. Up to 15 percent of the northern European population of individual water bird species overwinter in the Greifswalder Bodden and Strelasund area , which has therefore been declared a " European bird sanctuary ".

history

View from the island of Koos over the salt marshes to the densely built-up island of Riems

Riems was already settled in prehistoric times, as evidenced by Stone Age and Slavic archaeological finds. An archaeologically proven late Slavic settlement was located directly on the island, but it still extended well into the early German period.

In 1313 Riems was first mentioned in a document as "Rymiz".

Later, the island and the neighboring village of Gristow belonged to the von Dotenberg family. Between 1375 and 1382, Riems and Gristow became the property of the city of Greifswald, which leased the then uninhabited island as pastureland . After 1820, the town built a homestead, which was sold to the previous tenant in 1883. Today not many people live on Riems, there are only 13 residential buildings, namely five single or two-family houses and eight multi-family houses with a total of 62 residential units.

The island of Riems was spun off on July 1, 1950 from the dissolved municipality of Gristow . It formed an independent municipality until it was incorporated into the city of Greifswald on January 1, 1957.

"Riemser Ort" has been named as a place since 1959, and it was not until 1995 that the place was named "Insel Riems" in the municipality register.

Virus research at the Friedrich Loeffler Institute

The island of Riems is home to the oldest virological research facility in the world, which has been built there by Friedrich Loeffler since 1910 . Loeffler, full professor at Greifswald University , had found out through filtration experiments in 1898 that the dangerous foot-and-mouth disease was not caused by bacteria , but by a previously unknown class of “very small organisms” - he had discovered the viruses . After Loeffler unintentionally infected an entire region near Greifswald with foot and mouth disease during his investigations, he moved his institute to the island of Riems in 1910 for safety reasons.

In the Third Reich , potential bioweapons were examined for Riems .

During the GDR era, research and vaccine development at Riems provided work for around 800 people, currently less than half. The former production facility for animal vaccines was spun off after reunification and privatized as Riemser Arzneimittel AG. Today it has around 150 employees at the Riems location.

The Riems research complex has been the headquarters of the Friedrich Loeffler Institute (FLI) since 1997. The tasks of the FLI include research into animal diseases such as BSE , foot-and-mouth disease and swine fever , and the development of preventive and protective measures against them, particularly veterinary vaccines. In 2006, research was carried out on a vaccine against the H5N1 bird flu on Riems . From 2008 the facility was expanded and modernized considerably. By the time it was completed in 2013, the federal government had invested around 300 million euros in the two new building complexes. 89 laboratories with different security levels and 163 stables were created. The plant was inaugurated by Chancellor Angela Merkel in August 2013 .

Because of research work with viruses, the island is again closed to the public after the residential area in the western part of the island was freely accessible for a few years in the 1990s. In quarantine stables and laboratories, security levels up to protection level 4 apply . For employees and visitors, this means laborious entry and exit with changing clothes and showering.

  • Beginning of the animal disease exclusion zone on the dam

  • The former production facility for animal vaccines, today Riemser Arzneimittel AG

  • The guinea pig memorial commemorates their use as experimental animals at FLI in FMD research since the 1920s.

Other use of the name

In the GDR, the name of the research island was borne by a DSR Rostock cargo ship . The coaster Insel Riems of the type 840 tdw was built in the Peenewerft Wolgast and put into service on December 27, 1961. The ship in the dimensions L: 59.4 m; B: 9.8 m and D: 3.7 m drove with a crew of 15 between the North Sea and the Baltic Sea and was in service until 1981.

literature

  • Bruno Benthien (Ed.): Greifswald and its surroundings (= values ​​of the German homeland . Volume 14). 1st edition. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1968.
  • Wolfgang Ewert: Island of Researchers (Berlin 1962)
  • Lutz Mohr : Between Ryck and Ruden . The socialist structure of our homeland using the example of ... the "Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut" Insel Riems - Bodden Islands as reflected in history. New Greifswald Museumshefte (NGM), No. 3, (Greifswald 1978)

Web links

Commons : Riems  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Manfred Niemeyer: Ostvorpommern . Collection of sources and literature on place names. Vol. 2: Mainland. (= Greifswald contributions to toponymy. Vol. 2), Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University of Greifswald, Institute for Slavic Studies, Greifswald 2001, ISBN 3-86006-149-6 . P. 114
  2. ^ Rudolf Biederstedt : Investigations on the settlement history of the Greifswald suburbs and districts . In: Baltic Studies . New series vol. 77. NG Elwert, Marburg 1991, p. 81 .
  3. ↑ Federal Statistical Office (Ed.): Municipalities 1994 and their changes since 01.01.1948 in the new federal states . Metzler-Poeschel, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-8246-0321-7 , pp. 110 .
  4. ↑ Erhard Geißler : Hitler and the biological weapons. Lit, ISBN 3-8258-4077-8 : p. 123 “... it was possible to infect cattle with FMD by spraying a virus preparation produced in the Reichsforschungsanstalt Insel Riems. "( Google Books )
  5. ↑ Handelsblatt: Merkel inaugurates new high-security laboratory. Retrieved December 25, 2013 .
  6. ↑ Focus: Merkel inaugurates new research complex on Riems Island. Retrieved December 25, 2013 .