2023-10-03 08:26:00
Joey Kelly, the former guitarist of the pop and folk band “The Kelly Family”, has attracted attention in recent years primarily as an extreme athlete with his ultra-long-distance runs and fundraising marathons. His latest project: walk along the column path that follows the former border between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic.
A mammoth task of 1,400 kilometers, which he will undertake in several stages in all four seasons from the summer of 2020 and which will take him through endless biotopes and nature reserves, through loneliness, rain and cold. He meets people again and again – from people with failed livelihoods in the former no-man’s land to retired border guards, Reiner Calmund and prominent refugees. And it literally runs into German-German history.
For him, it is the contemporary witnesses along the Green Belt that “make this strip come alive, who have beamed me back into a time that can only be understood here in this place and nowhere else,” he writes in the book “The Green Belt – Divided through Germany”which is now published by National Geographic.
“For me, the realization remains that health, which was always a priority for me, now comes second,” he sums up at the end of the book. “Freedom is now even more important; that’s exactly what a society has to fight for over and over again; you can never take it for granted.”
Also click through other photo series with Joey Kelly:
– On the Amazon: Till Lindemann and Joey Kelly’s journey to the Río Yavarí
– Bulli Challenge: How Joey and Luke Kelly drive to Beijing in the old VW bus
– “If he swallows you, you’re gone”: Rammstein singer Till Lindemann and Joey Kelly on the Yukon
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