September 4th : Gieboldehausen
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Flying into Frankfurt, and looking down over the surrounding countryside, I am always struck by how controlled and orderly everything is. On a patchwork quilt of fields there are villages situated everywhere just a few miles apart. Each village is contained within a borderline so distinct as to suggest that some superior physical force would make it impossible for a single brick or tile to stray across it. Within the border, each village is fully developed, packed with houses. Between the villages I could see no trace of a single building (although from the air, at the end of a 24-hour journey, I might have missed something). Clearly the Germans put a great deal of value on their agricultural land, but then so do the British and the French, without being able to achieve this high degree of organisation. I think one has to suppose that Germans are still much more susceptible to regulation than the rest of us. As for Americans, the idea of agricultural land being a national resource is still quite strange to most of us, and certainly shouldn't interfere with a person's right to put up a pulp mill or a wrecking yard any damn place he chooses. Me, I'm wobbling uneasily on the fence. I took a train from the airport, which is so beautifully organised, with the station right there, alongside the terminals. I was on my way first to Duisburg, one of the old industrial cities of the Ruhr, like Essen and Dusseldorf, which I know so well because of the quantity of bombs we dropped on them during World War II. I was going to sepnd the night with a friend in Duisburg, Dirk Erker, who once rode a bike through Afrika, and then later to India. I have that bike now in my front yard, waiting for him to do Amerika. His story is interesting. He's a mechanic with his own business. He's working at a time when Germany is at the end of a long economic crisis. Unemployment is very high, and yet he says his business is going like gangbusters. Very soon he and his wife, Ilka, hope to have enough saved to leave their working lives behind them. They won't even be forty. Come to think of it, through all the waves of recession that hit Europe periodically, I can't recall any of my personal friends ever having suffered as a result. We must be a privileged bunch of people, but it would be worth going into the subject some time. I borrowed a great old Golf from Dirk, and drove to Gieboldehausen the next day. 
Two over-riding impressions: First, even though I was trying to get away from the big traffic and explore the countryside around Götttingen there were always drivers charging along behind me, making it too uncomfortable to view the landscape. Secondly, there were windmills everywhere. I'm all for wind power, solar power, anything but oil power, and I suppose eventually I will get used to these windmills until, like power lines, you almost forget they are there. But for the moment they really do dominate the landscape. I was told that Germany has the largest number of windmills of any country in the world. I wonder if that's true.  Wolfgang and Ralph, the good guys who organised this meeting. |