Tobin Bechtel

“The Dutch–German border wasn’t always so invisible. Thomas Jefferson crossed it somewhere near here in 1788 and was amazed by the differences between two countries which he (like many Americans) had assumed were largely identical. Jefferson wrote in his diary: ‘The transition from ease and opulence to extreme poverty is remarkable on crossing the line between the Dutch and Prussian territory. [In Prussia] there are no chateaux, nor houses that bespeak the existence even of a middle class. Universal and equal poverty overspreads the whole.’ ‘The villages,’ he noted in Germany, ‘seem to be falling down.”
― Ben Coates, The Rhine: Following Europe's Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps