Blue River, Black Sea

by Andrew Eames

  ‘Didn’t you ever want to find out why? Why they left?’ I was beginning to wonder how his parents had died. Something lay behind all that anger.

  ‘Hey, I was too busy being an all-American kid, mainly because my folks so plainly weren’t. Not that they would have talked about it anyway. Leastways not to me.’

  Feeling we were rapidly entering difficult territory, I thought it was safer to change tack.

  ‘So you are here trying to trace family?’

  He shook his head and sucked on his ice. ‘Thing is, I don’t think they were from Germany itself.’

  ‘Ah, so probably from Sudetenland or Silesia or somewhere. Refugees. Maybe even Danube Swabians,’ I ventured, but none of the names seemed to register with him, so I continued: ‘I know a little bit about this. They probably had a really hard time. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘You think?’

  There was a silence during which he peered at me speculatively. Then he appeared to reach some decision, finished his ice-cream and placed some loose change on the table. ‘Need to git going. See ya.’

  And with that he returned to his bike and plugged in his phone, and once again the baroque cobbles of Eichstätt rang with the Voice of America.

  6

  Ingolstadt: a Shock En Route to the Forum

  At this point of the journey I had another of those narrow escapes for which I should be more than truly thankful. It involved my two items of baggage – a shoulder bag which had all my valuables and notebooks in it, and the saddlebags on the bike which had everything else.

  I was on my way to Ingolstadt, riverside home of car manufacturer Audi and where I’d made an arrangement to tour the factory, but when the day of the factory tour dawned I was still 30 kilometres away so a short train journey was required. Accordingly I waited at a quiet country station, and having never put my bike on a German train before, I was feeling not a little apprehensive about getting everything aboard.

  As it turned out everything went swimmingly, or so it seemed. German railways thoughtfully provide special on-board cycle zones, flagged by bicycle symbols on the outside of the relevant carriages. The train duly pulled in, I struggled aboard and I was just securing my bike, full of admiration for the facilities, when my world turned upside down. The bike was safe and sound, as were my dirty socks and T-shirts in the saddlebags, but everything of any real value was still in my shoulder bag – and that was still on the station platform, where I’d left it momentarily while lugging the bike over the threshold. And just as I realized what I’d done, the train started to move.

  What followed was a moment of complete, utter horror, so strong that I could feel it in my knees. My guts fell through to my socks and my head churned with the sound of a room full of washing machines. Everything was in that bag. My money, my credit cards, my notebooks, my passport, my telephone, and even my train ticket. I could go nowhere, eat nothing, call no one, without it. Its loss would ruin the next week, for sure, and it could well endanger the whole of the rest of my project. And I had nobody to blame but myself. What a fool I was! Not just for leaving the thing on the platform, but for not foreseeing such an eventuality and at the very least dividing my money between my two elements of luggage so that I would have some kind of emergency supply. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  It’s hard to keep your thoughts still in such circumstances. One of the first was ‘If only I hadn’t used that “privat” flannel hook!’ Followed by ‘Thank God I didn’t transgress with the toilet roll.’ Physically I virtually turned to stone, standing stock still in that moving train, but mentally I was all over the place, my thoughts scattering like a flock of newly released sheep without a sheepdog to shoo them, uncertain which way to go. What was I going to say to the ticket inspector when he found I’d boarded his train with no ticket or money? More importantly, what was I going to do when I got to the other end? How on earth do you extract yourself from a mess like this? I supposed I would have to go to the police.

  By now the train had been fairly rattling along for some minutes, and it started to slow. Of course – the next stop! I was unaware of how much time had elapsed, how much of a stopping train it was, how far we had travelled, or whether we’d followed a road, but it wasn’t miles and miles, and we hadn’t crossed any cities or gone through any tunnels, of that I was sure. Furthermore I could visualize the bag, still sitting tidily on its station bench. All was not lost – I knew where it was, and all I had to do was get back to it!

  I bundled my bike out as soon as the doors opened to find myself in a quiet agricultural village with no sign of any major road, but with half a dozen lanes snaking away across the fields in all directions. Scouring through the empty streets high on my pedals, trembling, adrenalin-fuelled, searching for a clue as to which route to choose, I met the eye of an old gentleman cutting his garden hedge. He listened to my question, clearly alerted by my strange accent and the urgency in my voice, and then he pointed out a track and explained how I should follow it, keeping left through several intersections until it met a road … it was 8 or 9 kilometres, he thought. As he spoke, I was reminded of another old gentleman whose eyes I’d met long ago, when my bag had been stolen on the island of Fuerteventura. Plainly, this was the Second Coming of my own personal representative on earth.

  Then I was away, hollering my thanks into the wind, gravel spitting from under my tyres, giving thanks to all those days of accumulated cycle fitness that now produced both power and speed. That journey was a blur. The tracks were gravel, not easy cycling, and I prayed at each junction that I’d heard him aright and listened well. When I eventually arrived at tarmac, exactly as he’d said I would, I blessed his cotton socks, his halo and his messianic beard; his boilersuit became a cotton shift, his hedge-trimmer a shepherd’s crook. From then on it was a matter of head down, pump hard, and pray that the phone in the bag didn’t ring, attracting passerby attention. As I pedalled, I rehearsed several different scenarios: the bag was there, untouched (dream on, I told myself); the bag was there, empty (more likely); the bag was on someone else’s shoulder (what would I say to them?); the bag was with the station controller (was there one? I think the station was unmanned); the bag was in someone’s car (probably that car coming past me now).

  I reckoned I had three things on my side. The first was the shortness of time that had elapsed, perhaps just twenty-five minutes, since I’d left it there. The second was the station’s rural location, which would greatly reduce the numbers of passengers who’d stood on that platform, and the third was the infrequency of the trains. Plus, of course, God.

  As I came storming down the final straight and swerved off the road into the station precinct, two things happened in quick succession. The first was that my rear tyre blew out with a bang as I hit a bump far too fast and too hard, and the second was that I saw the silhouette of my bag, exactly where I’d left it.

  Thirty seconds later I’d sprinted through the tunnel and was on the platform, clutching the bag to my chest, making all sorts of mental promises about being a good boy from now on, being nice to children, donating to charity, not using private flannel hooks, etc., etc. And resolving henceforth to divide my worldly wealth between my different kinds of luggage.

  Anyone watching this performance would have found it bizarre and possibly endearing, but there was absolutely no one there to witness it. The station was deserted, and no doubt it probably had been ever since my train departed. The birds continued to sing, the clouds continued to scud across the sky, a distant car made that straw-sucking-dregs-of-milkshake sound across distant tarmac, as if nothing had happened. It was only my own little world that had so nearly imploded, and even that wasn’t such a big deal in the overall scheme of things.

  Eventually, after many long minutes sitting cradling my bag as a mother would cradle a lost child, I uncurled myself from the edge of that bench and set about trying to mend the puncture. A small hole in a rubber tube was a very small price to pay.
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  After an experience like that everything becomes a bonus, at least until the adrenalin wears off. So when I eventually arrived in Ingolstadt, still just about in time for my tour, I was beaming idiotically. I presented myself at the Audi Forum after a gentle cycle through a city centre that was immaculately grouted by prosperity and Scotchguarded by wealth, where everyone smiled at each other. It all hung together so neatly and tidily that you could have turned the city upside down and shaken it and nothing would have fallen out.

  Audi is the guardian angel that suffuses Ingolstadt with well-being. The company settled here in the 1950s, a refugee corporation which found itself homeless after the division of Germany had placed its main plant at Chemnitz well and truly behind the Iron Curtain. It now employed 31,000 people – a third of Ingolstadt’s total population – turning out 2,200 cars a day, but you’d never have guessed anything was being made (apart from money) from the Audi Forum. This collection of glass pavilions felt like a living, walking architect’s model for some kind of campus, with everything just so. It was populated by smartly dressed and smiling young urban professionals. Dozens of them stood in gossiping groups around playing fountains, slim, good-looking, as self-conscious as extras on a film set. At regular intervals the groups would break up and then re-form in another area of the courtyard, in the shade of young trees, as they’d been told to do by the director.

  There was an unreality about the Forum. It didn’t feel like a place of work, because no one seemed hurried; it wasn’t a leisure attraction, because there were no families and no fee to pay; it wasn’t a student campus, because everyone was far too well dressed; it wasn’t a place of worship, because young urban professionals have little time for God. It could have been an advertisement for a high-class optician, or perhaps a dating agency for the cash-rich, time-poor. There was something Brave New World about it, largely because the figures on the set looked as if they’d all come from the same designer’s hand. The Audi board must have said to the architect, after viewing all the drawings and animations, ‘Yes, we’ll take those giant, cantilevered, curved constructions to display our product in; we’ll take the fountains, the courtyards and the young saplings for the spaces in between; and we particularly like the look of the people, we’ll take lots of them. A couple of hundred, probably more, and dress them in shades of grey. When can you have them delivered?’ So there they were, the Audi acolytes, strolling and smiling and feeling comfortable in the company of fellow disciples.

  The Forum is Audi’s contribution to the mythologizing of what American architect Frank O. Gehry has called ‘cultural expressions of movement’ (cars, to you and me). They’ve all done it, the German car manufacturers: BMW in Munich, VW in Wolfsburg, Mercedes in Stuttgart and Audi in Ingolstadt; they’ve all opened flagship visitor centres that redefine the concept of a factory outlet. This is not retailing, it is a leisure-experience-cum-marketing-operation. A massive flag-waving exercise which is all about brand image, brand loyalty and raising the brand profile, and which must be working, because these centres are attracting more visitors than the local art galleries and museums. Mind you, the car makers have yet to get the ultimate accolade of actually appearing on a Bavarian maypole.

  For customers already committed to the ideology, the likes of the Audi Forum must seem like glorious affirmation that they have made the right choice, which is why they smile, linger and stroll, enjoying the companionship of their community.

  For the manufacturer, the Forum represents a chance to celebrate what they’ve done, and this celebration is something the Germans have not always been good at doing. In the half-century that followed the war they left it to their products to speak for themselves, fighting shy of the messy world of advertising. It is not that they have never had the creative gene; after all, this is the nation of Beethoven and Goethe, whose Faust is so dense you need two brains to read it, one to try to work out what the hell Goethe’s on about and the other to keep your body alive while doing so. But the emphasis of the twentieth century has been on national resurrection through productivity, not individuality, of progress through organization and application, not through originality. Thoroughness and honest labour have been the touchstones of the German revival, and advertising, which dabbles in half-truths and exaggeration, is an uneasy bedfellow, particularly for a nation that had recently experienced the mass hysteria of the Nuremberg rallies. Put succinctly, Germans couldn’t allow themselves to bullshit, and in the modern world that meant that they were underpowered as salespeople, so they relied on letting the products do the talking. Or hired an overseas agency to do the bullshitting for them.

  A British architect working for a German partnership in Hamburg once explained this dichotomy to me. He saw his main task as to champion the talent within his firm, promoting it both within Germany and overseas. His fellow architects were producing great work, he said, but they didn’t have the self-belief to take it out and show it to the world.

  This lack of confidence is not just restricted to architecture, but to other creative industries. Lots of German design, advertising and brand consultancy is imported from overseas, much of it from the UK; we’re doing their blagging for them. Many of their TV programmes have a foreign inspiration, and their comedy shows regularly commission British writers. Their favourite piece of television comedy, repeated year after year on New Year’s Eve, on all channels and in all households, is a British end-of-the-pier sketch called Dinner for One, starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden, in the original version recorded back in 1963. Ask a German about Dinner for One and his eyes will light up, and he’ll start to quote the whole script, in English.

  So these palaces to automobility, these temples to vroom like the Audi Forum, are an important milestone for German society because they represent a change in mentality. They represent a nation starting to make some noise about what it’s good at, having recognized that just making things, however well, is no longer good enough – they have to be able to sell them as well. Fluffy marketing campaigns in television, newspapers and magazines are not their style; they’ve gone for show and tell.

  My Audi factory tour was led by a perfect corporate specimen in the true American mould, illustrative of the new generation bringing transatlantic marketing skills to German manufacturing. He was a young, ambitious man without a moment of self-doubt, who’d never encountered irony, and who delivered his message with a rather piercing insistence that what he said was the absolute truth and nothing but. He’d learned the gospel according to Audi, and he knew it inside out and back to front. Moreover, he gave it to us in our inner ear, via headsets that we all had to wear so we could hear him over the din of the factory floor. The voice of Audi inside our heads.

  The guide ran through the factory’s environmentally friendly credentials. He told us, with great earnestness, how 70 per cent of components arrived by train and 65 per cent of the end product left by train, which rather overlooked the fact that, no matter how they came and went, the whole purpose of the place was to make cars, and it is cars that are bringing the environment to its knees.

  And then, as we entered the production lines themselves, he asked us to switch off our mobile phones on the grounds that they might operate on the same frequency as the production-line robots, with potentially interesting results. There were, he said, 900 robots assembling the 20,000 components that went into the Audi A3. That represented 98 per cent automation, and certainly it was an impressive sight. These robots looked more like giant lobster claws than imitation people, with tiny, gleaming, multicoloured lights for eyes. They operated behind metal grilles that suggested captive animals at the zoo. Their arms waved, paused, dived, delved and delivered streaks of sparks, juddering with effort, eyes flickering through different colours of pleasure and pain. And between choreographed routines they would stop occasionally, winking impassively as they considered their next move, humming ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ before zeroing in on a new panel to deliver another delicate stripe of green glue.<
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  Up close, it was easy enough to see what they were doing, those robots, but further away they were just a sea of waving claws and it was impossible not to wonder what these angry beasts might really be up to over in the distance, away from the public eye. They could be making something for themselves in their spare time; they could be dismantling what their colleagues had just put together; or they could be stealthily dismembering one of the 31,000 workers who’d fallen into their hands. Perhaps the interdiction on the mobile phones was a serious mistake, and if we’d switched on we might have heard them plotting insurrection or planning their Saturday night out, how they were going to go to downtown Ingolstadt and hang out outside McDonald’s. After all, for them transport wasn’t a problem; they could knock together a suitable vehicle in a matter of minutes.

  Towards the end of the production line the robots were increasingly supplemented by people, completing the last stages of assembly, with the cars moving slowly overhead and the workers standing underneath, wearing them like hats. Then came the symbolic moment, the ‘marriage’ between the body and the chassis, the moment which should have been accompanied by trumpets and bells, but which instead was witnessed in sterility by a group of white-coated men with clipboards, watching for tell-tale escapes of juices, who looked decidedly unmoved by the poetry of the moment. A couple of stages further down the line came the crucial point when the fuel went in the tank, the key went in the ignition and the engine turned over for the first time, demonstrating that the whole 20,000-piece jigsaw had been worth the effort. Those cars that didn’t immediately burst into life – and there were one or two – were hand-hauled ignominiously out of the line to see the headmaster. After which they had to go round the last bit again until they got it right.