The Last Return 3

[Continuing the journey now on to Bamberg, my wife’s home town. Top photo shows evening on the Regnitz river at Bamberg as a ‘Little Venice’ effect. Bottom photo of a nice sticker in Bamberg showing what can be done just with consonants. ]

Sunday 28 April  

We travel on the smooth, extremely fast Intercity Express (ICE) from Munich to Bamberg. The train is bound for Hamburg via Leipzig and Berlin. It is a thrill at Munich Hauptbahnhof to see the ICE destinations displayed at the platforms: Prague, Berlin, Hamburg…, all giving a sense of swift reachability, of Europe and its rich cultural diversity thoroughly open to the interested traveller with adequate financial means. This kind of lower-carbon mobility seems important, enriching.

We are in a quiet carriage, initially disturbed by a few young Americans loudly conversing who probably don’t realise the designated nature of the carriage they are in. They are swiftly informed by a very irate young German woman. She later dons headphones after also complaining to the conductor about young children being allowed in such a carriage (the conductor has apologetically told her that this is only the case when the other cars are full).

The Bavarian landscape from Munich to Bamberg is a mix of neat, highly ordered, green, picturesque fields and villages ‒ the latters’ roofs often covered in solar panels ‒, small wooded remnants, many family-run small industries, long grey sound barriers to protect settlements from the high-speed train noise. The overwhelming feel is that of order, control, the complete hegemony of culture over nature, one visual version of the Human Age, the Anthropocene, often quite charming in places. Outside its immediate visual presence, my mind tells me this external charm or prettiness is mostly also an agro-industrial desert (Agrarwüste) in which the natural biodiversity of soil organisms, plants, insects, birds, mammals has been reduced to almost zero by many decades of monocultures, artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Industrial agriculture everywhere has probably been the main habitat destroyer of the Human Age. I see a lone man out walking his dog in a desolate wide expanse of flat, ordered fields just sprouting spring crops after a period of drought; I wonder how he feels.

(The last summer of 2018 was another shocker of extreme heat in Germany, helping, as in Australia, focus popular consciousness on global heating and climate chaos once again; the school strike movement Friday for a Future began the following winter after Greta Thunberg’s magnificent solo- sit-down strike before Parliament in Stockholm).

In Bamberg B’s old school friend E. picks us up at the station and takes us to her tiny apartment in Kesslerstrasse in the middle of town, originally part of the old Jewish quarter. The house was built in the 17^th century, the Baroque era of the Thirty Years War that completely devastated Germany. E. is generously giving us her flat for a week while she stays with a friend. I have never been in such an old house and small apartment before: lugging our suitcases, bowing our heads, we climb a very narrow, spiral, wooden staircase to enter the living room which is c. 4 by 4.5 m; there is also a very small bedroom half of which is taken up by the bed, a tiny bathroom with toilet and shower, and a tiny kitchenette with a small fridge and two-plate electric stove. The whole apartment is probably about 20-25 m². The walls are thick, the wooden floor is sloping and after two or three bad knocks to the head I learn to retract my head to get through two of the doors. It is very quiet, looks out upon a cobbled lane with old houses and three pollarded robinias, a perfect writer’s studio. I love it.

It is only about 150 m to the centre of town at the Gabelmann (literally ‘fork man’, i.e. Neptune) fountain, cafes, the open fresh-food market, St Martin’s Church, about 400 m to the old Rathaus twin bridges and Regnitz river. The evening light over the river, old harbour and roofs from the bridges has a certain Venetian quality as represented in a Tiepolo painting. I later learn that Bambergians have long spoken of this area as Klein Venedig (Little Venice); how much of our im-mediate perception is actually mediated, filtered through our cultural history and the latter’s predominant images, I wonder?

Monday 29 April

Today it’s raining and much colder. We catch a bus to S’s for a homemade pizza dinner invitation. S., daughter of an old friend and neighbour of B’s, is a high school teacher, her husband a didactics academic commuting to Munich. The latter is a Protestant and S. converted from Catholicism when she married him. On the way, Bamberg shows its less pleasant modern-industrial, working-class and lower middle-class, medium-density-suburban side. No tourists here.

The family comprises two adults and three young children. Again, spoilt by our antipodean sprawl and vast spaces, we get the sense of German or European spatial constriction as the kids cavort through the small living room and we eat our tasty homemade pizzas. I get a sense of psychological speediness and the common ongoing struggle to manage ebullient kids and maintain a sense of control of everyday life. I admire S. and the way she, overworked, seems to maintain this control while not resorting to top-down orders or loud bossiness. Everyone talks very fast, there’s little room to breathe out. We are told most Franconians (in contrast to Bavarians) seem to talk like this, some even maintaining a running commentary on the actions they are themselves performing.    

It seems the issues of housing affordability and gentrification are the same here as in Munich, Sydney and all over the affluent world as overpopulation, inequality, lack of real wage growth and the tyranny of the housing market increasingly bite. I know Sydney’s population growth has added an extra 30 – 110,000 people each year over the last twenty years as median house prices have gone from 250-300,000 to 1.2 million dollars; in 2016 about 2 million Australians commuted 90 minutes or more every day as affordable housing moves ever further away from city centres. (Later, I read online that a worker on the minimum wage in the US is no longer able to afford a two-room apartment in any US state or city).

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on July 1, 2021.