A walk on the Wildenrath side

You are unlikely to have heard of Wildenrath.  I certainly had not.  It is distinguished for nothing, except being near a minor RAF base.  It lies between Maastricht and Düsseldorf, near the meeting of Holland, Germany and Belgium.  As well as lying at this geographical crossroads, it is situated in the middle of the immense north-western plain of Europe.  The land around it is very flat.

As you approach the area, the flatness becomes more than just a feature; it becomes oppressive. It is not natural, and you feel as if your glance will run away to the horizon and never stop.  It is land without real features; move ten, fifty, a hundred miles in most directions and you will find the same.  Because it exists everywhere, nowhere round here exists at all. 

Wildenrath, then, is just another exemplum, not defined in itself, but only existing as a possibility amongst hundreds of others throughout the region.  It is the very model of a respectable German village. It has dour brick and stone church with a clock-tower and gilded hours on its faces, defining time for all to see.  It has a post office, another sturdy institution which carries no connotations of individual place, only function which is infinitely transferable.  It possesses a butcher's, baker's... and very little else. 

Except for the savings banks, of which there are two in Wildenrath.  For an English town, two would suffice for many thousand people.  Here it seems to cater for a few hundred at most.  The fact that these two members of a chain are present, just like the church and the post office, is not so surprising. The landscape demands it, since it could never take the rooted particularity of a corner grocer's shop, or a restaurant, say.  But more than that, the German character, if one can stoop to such a oversimplification, also seems to demand it.

It says do not waste your money: save it.  It says tie up the loose ends of your domestic economy.  It says keep Germany tidy.  Like the roads, and the houses and the gardens and the cars and the fields.  Even though it was autumn, there hardly seemed to be a leaf out of place.  And yet there were no obvious teams of road-sweepers ready to swoop at the first sign of recalcitrant foliage.  It was as if the trees accepted their Germanness, and themselves kept the roads so neat and tidy.

The houses too were perfect; too perfect.  There is no endearing graceful change with age like the darkening of varnish on an old master, or the criss-cross of lines on an old loved face.  The village stands as a reproof to somewhere like Venice which has resolved to acknowledge time, show its age, but do it with infinite grace.  Instead we have this refusal to accept these frailties.  Like the landscape, time itself has been rendered flat and featureless, with yesterday and tomorrow indistinguishable.

What, then, was the significance of the cigarette dispenser on the wall of a private house?  Is this what they mean by a walk on the Wildenrath side? 

(7.10.86)

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