Frankly … social  Just a Picture

Winter can be awfully grey up in the north of Germany. But against this dreary backdrop, Maximilian Buddenbohm comes across a remarkable social contrast.

January, February – a pretty dreary time of year, you work your way through one week at a time with no holidays and no highlights. Especially in northern Germany, where we don’t even celebrate carnival – that’s reserved for the south. Monotonous weeks, days like brown bread: not quite good, not quite bad either. Or maybe like brown bread with processed cheese: it’s edible, but not much fun. So we are gradually making it through winter after all. Maybe this winter is particularly sunless, more heavily overcast than in previous years. I’ve been reading lots of complaints about this dark, drab season, on their timelines people mention how tired they are, how much they long for light, for holidays and wide open countryside, for a change of pace. On the underground, the passengers at all hours of the day look as though they were about to nod off and slump over to one side.

All I have to offer today is an image, again from a walk around town. It may seem a bit cliché, but I can’t help it, that’s just the way things are in this big city. Many clichés are actually acted out every day.

Grimy pavement and a white marquee

I’d like to show you a little scene in front of the main train station. It’s all a bit grimy here, not much beauty to discover. No sunshine or blue sky, no trees or even a hint of nature. Just some pigeons flying by, which for most people probably doesn’t count as natural beauty. What I do see is plenty of concrete with unappetizing stains on it beneath the glass-and-steel canopy over the station’s forecourt. And the unadorned entrance to the escalator shaft with an endless stream of people riding up and down. A food truck selling crisps. In the background, taxicabs approaching, cars parking, double-decker sightseeing buses parked by the kerb, their drivers standing beside them, taking a cigarette break. The scene is framed along the edges by hotels and restaurants with neon signs advertising pizza and kebab. Just a slice of the big city – pretty easy to imagine, I suppose.

But there’s a white object that doesn’t quite fit in because it looks spanking new and clean. It’s a cruise line company’s marquee. It serves no purpose other than to mark the spot where the passengers’ luggage is to be handed over to the company’s effusively friendly staff. About twenty or thirty people, probably just arrived by train or bus, are queueing up in front of the marquee to check their bags. Some have huge suitcases: I guess they’ll need a lot of stuff on this cruise. I assume they and their luggage will be promptly transported to a big ship that’s waiting for them in the harbour. They don’t seem particularly impatient; on the contrary, they look quite calm and relaxed. They’re about to embark on a voyage, and the queue isn’t awfully long, so the wait hasn’t put a damper on their high spirits. They’re casually dressed, a bit more colourfully than the passers-by hurrying round them to get to work, to get home, to get to their everyday appointments.

Mainstream society

Cruises aren’t prohibitively expensive anymore, so we’re not looking at the fabulously wealthy here. Some of these folks queueing for a cruise could just as well be in line for a movie or a play at a theatre around the corner, waiting for a discount shop to open up in the morning or for something else to happen somewhere else in this big city. My point is you can’t walk by and say, “Hey, look, a bunch of typical cruisers.” That wouldn’t be true, there’s nothing conspicuous about them.

Perhaps you’ve been feeling a certain aversion to the very idea of a pleasure cruise for several lines now, seeing as it’s not exactly an environmentally acceptable way to travel – quite the contrary. I know. But to keep from getting indignant, which is usually too much aggro for me, I remind myself that I once took a cruise myself. That was a long time ago, back when I didn’t know or didn’t care to know about environmental issues. So I just didn’t bother to think about it. Actually, I found other aspects of a cruise so awful at the time that that was more than enough food for thought already. But I wasn’t entirely clued into the environmental thing yet. And now, although I admit it doesn’t come easily, I’m trying to give these latter-day cruisers the benefit of the doubt based on my own history: they’re still not clued into the environmental thing. And this line of argument actually works to stave off any indignation for a while.

So, these are ordinary people standing here, nothing special about them as far as I can see, except their decidedly casual apparel, but that’s not all that conspicuous. This here is mainstream society, as they say, standing in line. I could be standing with them, so could you, in all likelihood. Mainstream society queuing outside a white marquee.

A little encampment

Right next to them, just a few steps away on the soiled pavement of the station’s forecourt, is a small encampment of homeless people from Eastern Europe lying, sitting, squatting or standing around. My language skills are insufficient to say exactly where they’re from. And even if I did catch some snatches of Russian or Polish, I still wouldn’t know for sure which country they’re from. These are subtleties, to be sure, but I think they’re important. At any rate, I can hear that they’re from somewhere in Eastern Europe. And I can tell from their over-the-top antics that some of them have got a serious alcohol problem. All those full and empty bottles, the toasting, singing, slurring of words and staggering around – there’s no mistaking that.

A bunch of them are unpacking a big suitcase and divvying up the clothes inside – presumably donations, which I guess someone just dropped off or they’re from one of the charities operating at the station. The men are unpacking sweaters, thick winter sweaters with size tags on them, and holding them up against their chests to see if they fit.

Red suitcase

But here’s the thing: this suitcase they’re unpacking is big and red. And one of the couples queueing for the cruise have a big red suitcase too, which looks identical. I move a little closer to take a good look and… no doubt about it, same suitcase. The woman pushing the suitcase, who has just moved a step forward in line, has just noticed the resemblance too.

She nudges her husband and points at the suitcase the men are unpacking in the other group, then at her own. She glances back and forth and shakes her head, perplexed. Meanwhile, one of the men over there has noticed the coincidence too and points at the lady’s suitcase in the cruiser queue – and now you get the picture: two groups of people whose lives are poles apart and yet with identical suitcases. Two groups pointing at each other, uncertain whether to laugh or say something, perhaps in jest, or what might be a fitting reaction to the situation. They end up grinning at each other a little undecidedly, if nothing else. On the one hand, this guy who clearly hasn’t had a shave in weeks, camped out here with his buddies in front of the station, rummaging through donated sweaters; on the other, this lady about to be whisked off by friendly staff to a cruise ship waiting for her in the harbour, all according to plan and booked well in advance. Both standing here against the same backdrop and with the same prop, namely a big red suitcase, just a few steps apart and yet worlds apart.

That’s all I wanted to show you: just a picture.
 

February 2023