This blog started in Sep 2010, to capture stories from my home village Höfen in Southern Germany, where I was going to live again for one year. I’m now living back in London, and I keep thinking about what is rural.
Bamberg is the nearest town, 16 km away. It’s small, baroque, has a university, lots of colleges and 11 breweries. It has gained Unesco World Heritage status a decade ago, it’s therefore now fairly touristy, but it still has significant manufacturing industries, which are the main employer for the surrounding communities, including Höfen.
I was involved in peace protests and demonstrations against extending the military service there in the 1990ies. My ant seemed to have had more connections to a left scene and the actual German Socialist Republic throughout the 80ies – but this was never much talked about.
It took a chat with Margit Czenki, who I know through the Park Fiction project in Hamburg and a get together in Belfast and Paris*, to hear more about Bamberg’s important – even though very temporary – role in the German APO movement (extraparliamentary opposition).
She just sent me two books about this very particular time in Bamberg, and I’m indeed grateful to read about something that’s so local but connected, and left little resonance in the collective memory.
* This is not mentioned to make it all sound flash, but to explain the fact that local information sometimes comes from very far away.
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