While the British watch, Germans plant

By E.J. Iannelli
RAW STORY COLUMNIST

WEINHEIM, Germany — “Tis a month before the month of May, / And the Spring comes slowly up this way,” laments Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem “Christabel.”

I find the terse, punning title of Freddie Hubbard’s tune gives a better description of how things happened this year: “Up Jumped Spring.”

The change of season took us all more or less by surprise here in Weinheim, one of the larger towns along Germany’s famed Bergstraße, which spans more or less from Frankfurt at its northernmost point to Heidelberg at its south. A few cool days in late March suddenly gave way to warmth and sun, and it has stayed that way since.

Sunny weather like this brings the Germans out of their houses in droves. On the first day to allow us to forgo long sleeves, my wife and I ventured into the nearby Schloßpark and found the place packed with families. Many of them spanned several generations. A significant portion of the crowd had assembled around the spot of lawn near the park entrance to admire the newly blooming crocuses — purple, white and yellow dots among the green grass — while those who had managed to sneak past were wandering around the Exotenwald, a kind of arboreal garden stretching across acres of hillside.

We had hoped for a private stroll along one of the Exotenwald’s many wide paths, but all of them were bustling with people eager to see “earth’s most multiple, excited daughter” as she breezed into existence. It’s hard to begrudge them their desire to enjoy the same beautiful surroundings. And it wasn’t as if this gathering had been as unpredictable as the arrival of spring. How else would the Germans occupy themselves on such an inviting day? Television? Surely not.

There are countless stereotypes about the Germans, some amusingly justified, many preposterous and false; but one that seems to hold quite a bit of water is their general disinterest in television. An impartial observer would be hard-pressed to find a German worshiping the tube when an outdoor alternative exists. This recent weekend brought the Pflänzeltage (Plant Days) to town. Dozens of vendors lined the main street, or Hauptstraße, and local folk spilled outside to stock up on geraniums, begonias, chrysanthemums and any other plant that might be coming into bloom, not to mention a variety of cooking herbs and decorative shrubs.

But it doesn’t always take a special occasion to attract the crowds. Year-round, fine days bring groups and amblers to Hermannshof, the town’s botanical garden. The merest hint of sunshine draws our aloof neighbor, a die-hard clubgoer and night owl, out on his balcony, for hours at a time. Even a chilly Christmas afternoon sees the Schloßpark crammed as it is now, with families walking off the effects of the previous evening’s meal.

Compare this behavior with that of quite a few English expatriots we know. For them, television is an essential component of any modern home, like electricity or indoor plumbing. This is an unquestionable fact that is not altered by life in another country. So it isn’t uncommon for them to shell out hundreds of euros to have the infinite spread of channels (or even just the meager basics: BBC, ITV, Channels Four and Five) beamed in via satellite from the United Kingdom.

As is their custom, they would much rather sit down to a bit of telly after work than consider taking an evening constitutional. Meanwhile the Germans toss aside their napkins, push back their chairs, and head out to stroll and sample the goods from one of the town’s four ice cream stalls. Ice cream, incidentally, is the one food business that will never fail to turn a profit in this area of Germany.

I haven’t questioned the handful of Americans I know on this particular subject, but most of them are directly or indirectly involved with one of the large U.S. military bases in the region; and so I make the educated assumption that they, too, are as beholden to the talking picture box as their countrymen back in Duluth, Tacoma, Cherry Hill, Portland and every other city and hamlet.

During my year up north in Hamburg, I knew a young woman who used to sit and watch television every night while eating dinner with her U.S. host family. When she returned to Germany after her student exchange ended, she rebelled by trying to impose these odd habits on her own family. Her poor mother was left with no choice but to let her take her evening meal in front of the television — that, or face an impudent teenager supposedly enlightened by a year abroad.

Of course, the younger Germans are noticeably more TV-prone. In that respect, Germany hardly differs from any other Western nation. Teenagers want — nay, crave — their MTV, their Viva, their Viva2. Their older siblings hanker after the dubbed, anodyne American sitcoms, though perhaps they would be loath to admit it so openly. And there are a few domestic and imported TV programs that have attracted or continue to attract significant numbers of viewers from all age groups: Stefan Raab’s laugh-a-minute “TV Total”; the hip commentator Harald Schmidt’s eponymous show; the daft, pop-star-producing soap opera “Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten”; Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s brilliant televised literary critiques. The John Cleese sitcom “Fawlty Towers” and “The Osbournes” (the latter undubbed) have proven to be big hits as well.

As a result of this growing demand and the rise of special interests, cable television has been introduced to more and more households in the past decade. Likewise, you would have to be blind to miss the satellite dishes sprouting in malignant clusters from the sides of apartment buildings, all of them trained in the direction of the god of signal transmission. But these tend to appear more frequently in the Turkish ghettos than they do in other residential areas.

So, yes, there are signs that the Germans one day might find reruns of “Friends” and “Leave It to Beaver” far more compelling than a walk in the park or a leisurely loop around the botanical garden. For the time being, however, they prefer to take a less passive route to their entertainment. This is something I find reassuring. I hope it persists, unchanged by the rapid passing of these seasons.