The Last Return 13
[Photos of houses in Bad Vilbel. Top two of premodern and postmodern houses opposite each other in the same street. The images probably speak for themselves. The bottom photo is of the sign on a house translated in the text.]
Wednesday May 8th
We move to a rented apartment in Bad Vilbel where my old friend E. and her husband W. live, also on the northern outskirts of Frankfurt. E. is a retired primary-school teacher, W. runs a natural vision/eye-care consultancy and also makes sculptures. Rain has set in, good for the drought situation in Germany, not so great for us.
E. takes us on a first reconnaissance around the town, like most places heavily bombed in the second world war. An old spa town since at least the eighteenth century and still well known for its much-sold bottled mineral water (most Germans restrict their water consumption to mineral water), there are a few lovely old Fachwerkhäuser left, a splendid park along the small Nidda river, but much of the rest is the usual depressing blandness of modern post-war construction.
This blandness, however, may conceal deeper layers of traumatic experience and human resilience: I notice a sign on a house which, translated, reads: ‘This house was totally destroyed during an allied air-raid on 2/3/1944. It was re-built again in self-help by our family from 1946 to 1950. Never again fascism! Never again war!’
E. takes us to their centuries-old Fachwerkhaus in a nearby village which they are renovating under the strict heritage-conservation and energy-efficiency guidelines set by local authorities. Inside the house Bulgarian and Serbian workers are building new straw-bale internal walls and applying mud-cork insulation. Great to see this pleasing fusion of the pre- and postmodern in a building, the best of both worlds.
In mildly drizzling rain we then walk over the partly re-naturalized Nidda river to a large farm on the outskirts, the Dottenfelderhof. This mixed farm, dating from the Middle Ages, was revived in 1968 along biodynamic lines and is now run very successfully also as an onsite retail business stocking their own and other biodynamic and organic produce. Quite pricey, and thus restricted to middle-class consumers like us as usual. It might be run along Steiner’s premodern, semi-occult anthroposophical lines, but I wonder about the fossil-fuel and soil-compaction costs of the very large tractors in the shed.
memengineering 