Trip to Lower Franconia

Medieval Gate in Obernburg

 Posted by James


Last week, Renate and I did a trip to Franconia to visit with our brother-in-law in Nuremberg and to attend Renate's high school class reunion in Erlenbach. Whether the trip would go forward at all was a bit touch and go. The locomotive engineers declared a strike, the third time I think since the beginning of the year, due to a power dispute and a dispute about time off. But the Deutsche Bahn arranged for substitute trains, and we took one over Hannover to Nuremberg, where our brother-in-law lives.

On the way to the train station by taxi (since the S Bahn was only running every twenty minutes due to the strike) we saw this young woman standing out in the middle of the street performing a juggling act in front of cars waiting for a traffic light to turn green:

which seemed kind of a prototypical Berlin Moment.

The trip took about an hour longer than expected, with an hour layover in Hannover. Along the way, we had a good look at evidence of Germany's "Energiewende". Germans call the time in 1989-1991 when the Berlin Wall came down and the two halves of German reunited "Die Wende", the Change or the Transformation. In 1988, nobody ever thought it would be possible for Germany to reunite, even though it was a dream of the people on both sides since the end of WWII and even enshrined in the West German constitution. In the early 2000s, the government decided to apply the same principle to energy, and so called it "Die Energiewende", the Energy Transformation. Germany now gets more than 30% of its energy from renewable sources, many of them wind machines like these along the train route in north Germany:

You see wind machines everywhere out in the countryside, and solar panels on many people's roofs. While some people don't like what the wind machines do to the views of the landscape, before the wind machines went up, there were factory smokestacks in towns and of course the ubiquitous power pylons everywhere. Climate change isn't a political issue in Germany, the only political issue has been how to address it, in particular whether Germany's nuclear power plants should be shut down. That was settled when the two reactors at Fukushima melted down in 2011, and now the plan is to site wind machines in the North Sea and run DC power lines (to reduce losses) to south Germany where much of the industry is located.

The Energiewende is still a work in progress. Brown coal power plants have made a comeback because they are the only kind of fossil fuel power that is cheap enough to compete with renewables. Unlike the US, gas comes from Russia and is typically only used for home heating and industrial heat. But the important point is that German society has made the commitment and the necessary laws and regulations are being put in place as needed. The laws and regulations shape the business and economic environment to slowly move German society away from fossil fuel and towards renewables.

In Nuremberg, we stopped briefly to borrow a car from our brother-in-law and say hi to one nephew, who was headed out for a month on an auto rally. Then we drove to the lower Main River Valley, or Lower Franconia as it is known ("Unterfranken" in German). Franconia (Upper, Middle, and Lower) is the most southern part of the state of Bavaria, and the Franconians are always complaining about the Bavarians: all the money goes to Munich and Upper Bavaria, the nicest archeological finds are spirited away to the Munich museums, and so forth. Franconians have their own dialect and their own foods ("Schauefle", pork shoulder with the bone still in it, special kinds of pretzels that are about half as big as the typical German pretzel, and also Nuremberger bratwurst, while the Bavarians have weisswurst ) and are in many ways different from the Bavarians. But when you suggest to them, why don't you follow the Scottish example and petition the federal government to become a new state, they inevitable demur and say that it doesn't make economic sense.

Renate attended high school in Erlenbach, a small town on the lower Main river. Technically the high school was a Gymnasium in German, not a hall with exercise equipment as in the US but a high school strictly for college preparatory students. Students on other tracks went to other high schools. We stayed overnight with an old friend of the family in Obernburg, an old medieval town on the opposite side of the river from Erlenbach:

Part of the reunion involved a tour of the Gymnasium, led by the current director. The school was about to be half torn down and rebuilt to accommodate more students. As the current building was still under construction during the first year that Renate attended, this was an opportunity for the graduates to see it one last time before it disappeared. The alumni were even offered the opportunity to get a piece of the old building, like people did with the Berlin Wall. I enjoyed the tour as it gave me an opportunity to compare a German Gymnasium to an American high school as I remembered it. The most striking thing was the complete lack of any sports facilities. German high schools don't have nearly the amount of extracurricular activities that American ones do, and they especially don't have any sports teams associated with the school. Physical education classes are part of the curriculum, but the activities are carried out on facilities outside, and the classes are only one hour a week.

The reunion itself took place in a small tavern. Only about 10 people were there, and some of them were interviewed by current students of the Gymnasium who were participating in an oral history project. Several of the former classmates were already retired, mostly unwillingly, and some where still working at side jobs but most of them still worked full time. In Germany, people in Renate's age group need to work until 66 before they can start drawing a state pension. In America, people in our age group can draw Social Security at a reduced payout rate at 62 1/2, but as in Germany, the full payout is only at 66.

We left around 8:30 for the trip across the river back to Obernburg.