Cora Buhlert

In November, a German Masters of the Universe collector told me that there would be a Masters of the Universe themed holiday event on December 14, which sounded like a lot of geeky holiday fun.

The only problem was that the event took place in Hanau, a city some twenty kilometers to the east of Frankfurt on Main. That’s 471 kilometers away and driving there would take between four and five hours, depending on the traffic. That’s too far for one day. The train wasn’t really an alternative either in this case, because there is no direct connection, so I’d have to change trains two or three times, which would take longer than driving. Besides, German trains are always overcrowded on the weekends and tickets are more expensive. The trains also switch to a new schedule this weekend. Theoratically, there also was the option to fly from Bremen to Frankfurt and take a train to Hanau, but that’s not happening.

So the best possibility would be to drive down to Hanau on Saturday, spend the night there and drive back the next day. I dithered for a while, checked the 14-day weather forecast (because frost and snow are not conductive to long drives), checked available hotels along the route and then said, “Okay, I’m doing it.”

And you know what that means. It’s roadtrip time!

Autobahn A1 and A27

Because I had a long drive ahead of me, I set out at shortly after five AM. Because it’s December, roughly a week before the winter solstice, it was pitch dark. In fact, the sun wouldn’t rise until half past eight.

I made my way to the Brinkum exit of Autobahn A1, because in my region every longer journey starts on the A1, and counterintuitively drove in northbound direction towards Hamburg for the first fifteen kilometers or so. Indeed, Else, my GPS, keept insisting I should exit the Autobahn and turn around.

Now there are two different routes to get from Bremen to Hanau. The first is to take the A1 in southbound direction and then change onto the A45 until Hanau. This was also the route that Else wanted me to take. The major issue with this route is that not only would I have to brave the 33 kilometers monster construction zone between Lohne/Dinklage and Bramsche as well as the northern edge of the Ruhrgebiet, but the A45 is also beset by construction work every couple of kilometers, because all the highway bridges and viaducts have to be replaced at the same time and there are sixty of them. The second generation of German Autobahnen were all built in the 1960s and by now the bridges are crumbling and need to be replaced, which is why there is so much construction work everywhere.

The second route is somewhat longer, but also faster due to less construction work along the way. It takes the other major north-south route through Germany (and Germany’s longest Autobahn), Autobahn A7. This was the route I was going to take, even though I don’t like the A7 very much, because it’s unpleasant to drive and has even been called “Germany’s longest nightmare”. But more on that later.

After approx. fifteen kilometers on the A1, I changed onto Autobahn A27 at the intersection Bremer Kreuz or “das Kreuz”, as we call it here, because all the other intersections are quite far away, so there’s no risk of confusion. The A27 connects the North Sea ports of Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven with Hannover and from there with Berlin and Eastern Europe, so it’s quite important and can also be busy, particularly with truck traffic. However, at five AM on a Saturday morning, it was largely empty. Even the trucks were still parked in the rest areas along the road.

The A27 is a very dull Autobahn, because from Bremen it basically passes through a lot of nothing in both directions. In southeastern direction, this whole lot of nothing is mainly woodlands, punctuated by a few towns. Though at least I wasn’t missing anything by driving in the dark, because there’s nothing to see here by day either.

All direction signs on the A27 point towards Hannover, but that’s not actually where the highway goes. Instead, it goes to a town called Walsrode, which is notable for an abbey, which dates all the way back to the 10th century, though the current buildings mostly date from the 18th century, as well as for Walsrode Bird Park, a popular local attraction. Indeed, the area around Walsrode is home to several theme parks (Magic Park Verden, Walsrode Bird Park, Serengeti Park Hodenhagen and Heidepark Soltau), because even though the region itself is sparsely populated, it’s within easy reach of Hamburg, Bremen and Hannover with some four million people altogether.

Autobahn A7

In Walsrode, the A27 meets Autobahn A7. Here, the A7 cuts through the Lüneburg Heath and Südheide nature parks. By daylight, you can see tufts of heath and the distinctive pale sandy soil of the Lüneburg Heath by the roadside. By night, you can see nothing, but then it’s not heath bloom time anyway.

In recent years, the A7 has been newly paved and expanded to three lanes in each direction, so in theory it should be pleasant to drive. In practice, however, the tarmac they used is oddly slippery and unpleasant. Supposedly, this type of tarmac dampens noise emissions, which is a good thing. However, it’s also really unpleasant to drive on.

After approximately thirty-five kilometers, you reach Hannover. There’s not much to see here either, because the A7 swings around Hannover in a fairly wide arc. In addition to several intersections, the only thing you can really see of Hannover – and the first thing I associate with the city – are the marl quarries and cement factories on the edge of the city. Even at six AM – I had been driving for roughly an hour by now – they were brightly lit.

This was also where I made my first brief pitstop, at the Seckbruch rest area. I wanted a sip of water, but fiddling with a water bottle, while going 130 kilometers per hour or so on the Autobahn in the dark, isn’t a great idea, so I drove onto the Seckbruch rest area to drink some water and have two pieces of chocolate, before heading onwards.

After another twenty-five kilometers I reached Hildesheim, a city famous for two Romanesque cathedrals, which are a UNESCO World Heritage site, as well as a sacred rosebush that’s supposedly more than a thousand years old, though you obviously can’t see any of this from the highway. My Mom always insisted that the thousand year old rosebush was a scam BTW.

The House of the Butchers Guild in Hildesheim, built in 1529. This photo was not taken during this trip, but during another trip to Hildesheim in late November.

A giant Christmas pyramid at the Hildesheim Christmas market. This photo was also taken during the visit in late November.

Up to this point, I was quite familiar with the route, because I’ve driven it lots of times. In fact, I visited Hildesheim only three weeks before, which was also part of what inspired me to go on the longer trip to Hanau, since I figured I’d already done half the trip easily (well, more like one third).  Beyond Hildesheim, however, my knowledge of the route gets fuzzy.

Harz and Solling

Just beyond Hildesheim, you also reach the point where the glaciers of the last ice age stopped and you suddenly get mountains. Okay, they’re more like hills, but if you come from the North German lowlands where the highest elevation is 80 meters above sea level, even hills of 200 or 300 meters sure look like mountains. This effect is most pronounced at Porta Westfalica, where the mountains literally jut out of flat land at the Weser gorge, but it happens elsewhere as well.

The first hills just south of Hildeheim are called Vorholz (literally pre-wood). Shortly thereafter, you get the more famous Harz with North Germany’s highest mountain (and yes, this one is a real mountain), the Brocken, which reaches up to a stunning 1142 meters above sea level. According to legend, the Brocken is a gathering place for witches and demons. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mentions it in Faust and it also gave its name to the optical phenomenon known as the Brocken spectre, since the Brocken is nigh permanently shrouded in fog.

The Harz is a popular holiday region, both in summer and winter. In summer, you get hiking and picturesque towns, in winter you get the northermost place in Germany where you can go skiing. The peak of the Brocken is usually covered in snow from September to May, though climate change is also hitting the Harz.

However, even though I was passing through the western edge of the Harz, I only knew where I was was from the names of the highway exits and service stations and the tourist information signs along the Autobahn. Because it was still dark at this point, so I couldn’t see any mountains. Though occasionally, I’d catch a glimpse of lights above the Autobahn or I’d cross a bridge and see lights below.

But even though the Harz is a popular holiday destination and only about two hours away, we never went there. In fact, the only time I’ve actually been in the Harz mountains (though not on the Brocken, because that was still East Germany at that point) was during a school trip at the age of twelve. Because my parents preferred the other mountain ranges in the area, the Weser Uplands and the Solling. Indeed, my parents often said that they didn’t understand why so many people insisted on visiting the Harz, even though the Weser Uplands and Solling were much prettier. Not that I could tell, because it was still dark by this point.

My Dad also told me once that the mountains to the east of the A7 were called the Harz and the mountains to the west were called the Weser Uplands and the Solling. As a kid, I found this baffling, because the mountains had clearly been there long before the A7 was built, so how would people have known which mountains were which without the Autobahn to use as orientation? Of course, the A7 passes through a natural lowland dividing Harz and Solling and follows the approximate route of much older roads, so people clearly knew which mountains were which.

But even though my knowledge of the A7 beyond Hildesheim is fuzzy, I realised that I recognised many of the exits and town names, particularly on the Solling side. Because even though I haven’t been in this area recently, I visited the Solling and Weserbergland lots of times with my parents in the past and was familiar with many of the town names.

Göttingen

The next bigger city along the A7 is Göttingen, famous for its university. Göttingen is also where my Aunt Irmgard (nicknamed Aunt Irmgard from Göttingen to distinguish her from another Aunt Irmgard) used to live. Aunt Irmgard was a cousin of my Dad. Her husband was what we would now call a hoarder. We visited them several times when I was a kid and I was always told not to comment on the stacks of newspapers and magazines everywhere.

Indeed, Aunt Irmgard is part of the reason why I’m familiar with the are around Göttingen. Because I have or rather had family in the area. My Great-Aunt Mariechen, the older sister of my grandfather, worked as a nurse in WWI. Here she met Heinrich, who was a member of the famous Prussian Lange Kerls (Tall Guys) regiment of extremely tall soldiers. Mariechen was small and plump, Heinrich was tall and dashing. They fell in love, married and moved to Heinrich’s family farm in the village of Offensen near Göttingen. Aunt Mariechen and Uncle Heinrich kept in close contact with my grandparents and my Dad and his brothers often spent the holidays on the farm in Offensen. Later, when my Dad met my Mom, he’d take her on holiday to Offensen – even before they were married, because Tanta Mariechen and Uncle Heinrich made sure there would be no hanky-panky. Uncle Heinrich died before I was born and Aunt Mariechen died when I was two. The only memory I have of her is oddly enough of her funeral. The chapel had stained glass windows and angels, which so impressed me that I had to point out how pretty it all was in the middle of the funeral service, so a nice lady from the village took me for a walk on the cemetery, where I found a cool white stone. I still have the stone. But even though Aunt Mariechen and Uncle Heinrich were gone, we still visited Offensen whenever we were in the area. By that time, the family farm had been taken over by a nephew of Uncle Heinrich’s. He later died as well and his widow remarried. Dad kept visiting them until a few years ago, often with his motorbike. I tried to call them after Dad died, but the number was no longer current.

When I saw the town Adelebsen listed as one of the destinations at the exit Göttigen North, I realised that Offensen had to be not just somewhere in the general area, but pretty close by, because Adelebsen was the neighbouring town of Offensen. At this moment, I decided that on my way back I would stop by in Offensen and ring the bell of the farmhouse to see if anybody was home. But more on that later.

By now, I was also feeling some pressure in my bladder. Most rest areas along German Autobahnen are equipped with public toilets, but the cleanliness is highly questionable. And since my need wasn’t that urgent, I could wait until the next proper service station, which happened to be Göttingen East. I perused the toilet and – when I saw that the coffee counter was already open and manned or rather womanned at 7:45 AM I decided to have a coffee as well to refresh myself for the journey.

By the time I left service station Göttigen East, the relentless oppressive darkness outside was getting ever so slightly lighter, slowly fading into relently greyness. As I drove onwards, I could gradually make out the outlines of misty mountains on both sides of the highway.

The Kasseler Mountains

Though there were not just misty mountains on both sides of the highway – no, the Autobahn itself suddenly started getting hilly and curvy. There were plenty of curves, slopes and inclines – the steepest was a whopping 8% – and speed limits of 100 to 120 kilometers per hour. Not that you could drive any faster anyway without putting yourself and others at risk. I had reached the infamous Kasseler Mountains.

Of course, Kasseler Mountains is not the proper name of this area. The mountains have names like Sandwald, Kaufunger Wald, Knüllgebirge, Habichtswald and Großer Staufenberg. However, to people unfortunate enough to drive along this curvy and steep stretch of Autobahn, they are known as the Kasseler Mountains, because Kassel is the next big city along the route and the one which is listed on all the direction signs. Particularly truckers hate the Kasseler Mountains and would often use country roads instead, much to the annoyance of the people living in the towns along those roads. At one point I even saw an emergency stop lane for trucks suffering brake issues.

Now the very point of an Autobahn is that they don’t have many curves and steep inclines, so the main question which comes to mind while crossing the Kasseler Mountains is “Why?” Why is this Autobahn so curvy and steep, even though the mountains it crosses aren’t all that high? After all, it’s not as if the Kasseler Mountains are the Alps?”

The answer is that the Göttingen-Kassel leg of the A7 is one of the original Third Reich era Autobahnen, built between 1934 and 1938, though the planning phase goes back to the Weimar era. The Nazis mostly adopted the Weimar era Autobahn plans and claimed them as their idea, but in the case of the A7 they made an exception and threw out the original plans, which would have followed a more sensible route with fewer curves and steep inclines and viaducts. Instead, the Nazi planners came up with the current curvy route with its steep inclines and high viaducts, because they wanted to prove that they could do it. Besides, this route would offer lovely views to tourists. And some of the views are indeed lovely – or would be, if I could actually see more than mist and December gloom.

That said, the actual Autobahn has long been repaved, expanded and replaced since the Nazi era . But the idiotic route is still in place, because no one wants to build a completely new Autobahn, when there is an existing one already in place. As for why the Nazis were so eager to build this stretch of Autobahn, even though the area between Göttingen and Kassel and beyond isn’t particularly densely populated even today and was even less so in the 1930s, Kassel was the locasion of several big propaganda events in the 1930s (and I just realised that Aunt Mariechen and Uncle Heinrich must have witnessed the Autobahn being built), so this Autobahn was prioritised, even though there would have been more important stretches to to build first.

Though next town of note along the route through the Kasseler Mountains is not Kassel, but Hannoversch-Münden, where the rivers Werra and Fulda meet to form the Weser. I had already crossed the Weser back in Bremen and now, near the Hedemünden exit, I crossed the river Werra on the Werra valley viaduct, which is North Germany’s highest bridge at a whopping 59 meters. The Werra valley viaduct was part of the original 1930s Autobahn, though again it has been rebuilt and replaced several times. The current viaduct dates from the 1990s, though you can still see a Nazi era relief on one of the distinctive red stone pillars.

The Nazis were big on beautiful views and so they designed the Werra valley viaduct to offer a stunning view of the Werra valley. Originally, there even was a rest area allowing you to stop and enjoy the view, though that was removed ages ago, because it tended to cause accidents with trucks crashing into parked cars. As for the stunning view, the current viaduct is flanked by sound barriers, so you can’t see any of it.

After crossing the Großer Staufenberg, the A7 descends towards Kassel and for once you can actually see the striking view that the Nazi era planners intended. At any rate, I suddenly saw the lights of Kassel shimmering below in the morning mist. I’m sure it’s a great view, if the weather is better. There’s even a rest area called Herkulesblick (Hercules View) in reference to Kassel’s famous Hercules statue.

Kassel itself is known for the Wilhelmshöhe park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and for the documenta art exhibition, which takes place every five years. Yet for some reason, it’s not a city I’ve ever visited, just a spot I’ve driven past. In fact, I considered stopping at Kassel to visit the Wilhelmshöhe park on my way home, but that’s best done in the spring and summer, when the weather is nicer and the artificial waterfalls are switched on. As for the documenta, the next one is in 2027, which give me plenty of time to decide whether I want to go. In recent years, the documenta has been more notable for scandals than art.

Terra Incognita

While my knowledge of the route became fuzzy after Hildesheim, it was pretty much entirely gone after Kassel. I know that I must have driven this route before with my parents, but I recognised very few of the town names and exits. And those I recognised, I didn’t recognise because I’d been there before, but because I associated these towns with books, movies or stories by relatives.

At a town called Guxhagen beyond Kassel, the A7 crosses the river Fulda, which means that I had now crossed the river Weser and both its source rivers. A bit later, you also pass Castle Neuenstein, which sits directly next to the Autobahn and is one of the more interesting sights along a route that’s mostly woodlands and mountains.

Meanwhile, the information signs along the road and the exits told me that I was passing the Rhön mountains. My Aunt Ilse and Uncle Uwe always spent their holidays here in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, Hilders, the town where they stayed, was listed on one of the exit signs.

By now, it was approaching nine AM and I decided to stop somewhere for breakfast. I passed several Autohöfe and one service station, but the service stations are over-priced and the food quality usually isn’t good. And the Autohöfe only had internationl fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King or Subway, which I tend to avoid. That said, the Malsfeld Autohof also turned out to have a restaurant of the Maxi chain, a German chain of truck stops which is pretty decent. However, I only spotted the Maxi logo, once I’d already driven past the exit. So onwards it was.

I finally did leave the Autobahn at the exit Bad Hersfeld West, because I faintly recalled reading somewhere that Bad Hersfeld had a Rosi’s Autohof, another German truck stop chain, which is pretty decent. However, Bad Hersfeld is quite a bit away from the A7, which means there are several exits named Bad Hersfeld. And the Rosi’s Autohof I remembered seeing advertised is actually on the A4, a completely different Autobahn.

Worse, Bad Hersfeld West is one of those Autobahn exits that disgorge you in the literal middle of nowhere. Or rather, it disgorges you into a village called Aua (the onomatopoeic German word for the sound you make when you stub your toe), which has a couple of houses, a Shell gas station and a depot of the GLS logistics company. What they do not have is a place to have breakfast – unless you fancy gas station coffee.

So I checked Google Maps on my phone and saw that the next exit Kirchheim had an Autohof and a retail park directly by the Autobahn, probably because the junction Kirchheimer Dreieck, where the A4 meets the A7, is one of the busiest in Germany. There’s construction work going on there and so the Autohof restaurant turned out to be closed for renovations. But there was a Rewe supermarket with a bakery café called Guter Gerlach (Good Gerlach). I immediately wondered whether there was also a bakery called Bad Gerlach in the area, cause that would be funny.

My breakfast at Bakery Guter Gerlach. The cookies are supplies for the road.

I had a tomato and mozarella sandwich and a latte macchiato for breakfast and also bought a bag of holiday cookies to keep me supplied for the rest of the way. Thus refreshed, I set off again for the final hour or so of my journey.

Into the Fulda Gap… and Post-Apocalyptic Lands

After Kassel, the next city of note along the A7 is Fulda. I always found it somewhat irritating that the city bears the same name as the river on whose shores it lies.

Fulda is also (in)famous for another reason entirely, namely because it lend its name to the so-called Fulda Gap, where World War III was expected to begin.

Basically, Fulda is located only approximately 35 kilometers from the former border between East and West Germany, because East Germany, more specifically Thuringia, juts furthest into West Germany at this point. The US military, for reasons best known to themselves, expected that should the armies of the Warsaw Pact ever attack West Germany, they would do it here. And since there are quite a lot of difficult to cross mountains and woodlands in the region, the US Army expected that there were specific routes the Warsaw Pact armies would take – routes which correspond to valleys and also various Autobahnen. The endgame was conquering Frankfurt on Main, West Germany’s financial capital, as well as the Rhine-Main Air Base. There was even a boardgame which allowed you to play your own version of World War III.

Now I have to admit that I never quite understood why the US Army expected an attack from the East to happen at Fulda Gap. Personally, I always expected if the armies of the Warsaw Pact were ever to attack, they would do so in North Germany in the area around the Helmstedt-Marienborn border crossing, where there were no pesky mountains in the way. And since I had visited East Germany before the Fall of the Wall and had seen the generally dilapidated state of the country and its people (and the Red Army soldiers stationed all over East Germany), I always used to joke that the tanks would maybe get as far as Braunschweig, before they broke down, but the soldiers themselves would never get past Helmstedt, because they would stop to loot the first supermarket on the western side and then pass out from too much food and drink and that would be the end of it.

However, the US military took the Fulda Gap deadly seriously. There were plans and preparations made to blow up important roads and – worse – to nuke the area around Fulda and the Kinzig Valley to slow down the advancing Warsaw Pact troops. Okay, so these were only “low yield tactical nukes” with a limited radius of destruction, but that would be small comfort the people who happened to live around Fulda and in the Kinzig Valley.

One of the first intended targets for nuclear “friendly” fire was the village of Hattenbach, home to some 580 people today, because the Hattenbacher Dreieck Autobahn junction, where the A5 meets the A7 happens to be right next to the village. Indeed, as I drove through the Hattenbacher Dreieck and tried to make sense of its confusing signage (they have separate lanes for trucks and passenger cars), I wondered why the name “Hattenbach” seemed so familiar, even though very little else in the region was.

Once the plans of the US military to turn a swathe of Eastern Hesse into a nuclear wasteland came out, many West German people were understandably furious. Learning that the people who were supposed to be our allies were willing to nuke us proved beyond a doubt that to the US military, the people of (West) Germany weren’t allies or even human, but just collateral damage. They didn’t give a damn how many people their nukes would kill in Eastern Hesse, as long as they could protect their precious air base. Meanwhile, many West Germans probably thought that if the Soviets wanted Frankfurt on Main so badly, they were welcome to it (Frankfurt was beset by drugs, poverty and crime in the 1980s). And no one except politicians gave a damn about Rhine-Main Air Base. To regular Germans, it was just that part of Frankfurt Airport that normal planes couldn’t use.

Rearmament and the establishment of the Bundeswehr in 1956 had been highly unpopular in West Germany. I don’t know anybody who was alive back them and didn’t hate that idea and there was also huge protests, even though those are largely forgotten today. However, in the 1950s and 1960s and even into the 1970s, the overall attitude towards the US soldiers stationed in West Germany was mostly positive. I remember there being programs organised by the German towns that were home to US military bases to bring US soldiers and German civilians together such as US soldiers spending the holidays with German families, so they wouldn’t be lonely. That said, many US soldiers and their families tended to stick to themselves and stay on their bases. Germans also weren’t allowed to enter the shops at the US military bases to buy all the cool American books and comics and other products they had there. And yes, I know that there are legal reasons for this, but as a kid and teenager who just wanted Americans books and comics, this irked me to no end.

However, the US plans to nuke the region around Fulda pretty dispelled any illusion that the US was our friend and together with the NATO Double Track decision galvanised the West German peace movement and led to massive protests – some of the biggest ever seen in the country – in the early 1980s. Indeed, my high school chemistry teacher quit the Bundeswehr over this.  And yes, the Fulda Gap boardgame played a role, too, because it demonstrated only too clearly what the US military was planning. Ironically, that boardgame was really popular among members of the West German peace movement, who used to play it to demonstrate what would happen. This also is part of the reason why the Green Party was founded, because all other parties were pro-NATO and pro-militarisation. Indeed, the roots of the Green Party in the peace movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s is part of why the party’s 180 degree heel turn with regard to the war in Ukraine feels like such a betrayal, though not necessarily an unexpected one, because it’s been clear since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s that the reason the Greens always hated “war toys” so much is because they will take any chance they get to play with tanks and missiles and bombs.

The Fulda Gap ceased to be relevant in 1990. Even if Russia were ever to attack Germany – which I don’t believe they will, though sadly plenty of people in positions of power do – it wouldn’t happen here, because there no longer is an inner-German border and Thuringia is not going to attack Hesse anytime soon. The former border stations and observation stations on both sides of the border – there were a lot of those particularly in the Rhön mountains – are now museums. Nonetheless, driving through the area and reading the town names on the exit signs, I couldn’t help but think about how World War III was supposed to start here. The fact that the gloomy day and the bleak wintery landscape felt distinctly post-apocalyptic, didn’t help either.

This view across the Kinzig valley towards the Spessart mountains from the rest area Kinzigtal on the A66 is extremely bleak and reminiscent of the apocalypse that never came.

The Fulda Gap also appears in nuclear war fiction and movies of the 1980s. In the 1983 nuclear war movie The Day After, World War III starts at the Fulda Gap as well as Helmstedt-Marienborn (see, I was right), though it’s Würzburg rather than Fulda or Hattenbach that gets nuked first, albeit off screen. Meanwhile Denise, one of the most annoying characters ever to appear on screen, complains that she doesn’t care about what happens in West Germany, because her upcoming wedding is so much more important. Then Kansas City and a college town called Lawrence get nuked and the movie expects us to care about that, while dismissing the deaths of the people of Würzburg. As for annoying Denise, her husband-to-be gets incinerated by the bomb and Denise stupidly runs out into the fallout and eventually succumbs to radiation sickness. In fact, I think the cavalier way that the deaths of thousands of German people is handled in the movie, which then expects us to care about American soap opera clichés is why I actively dislike The Day After. In the much superior British nuclear war drama Threads, WWIII starts in the Persian Gulf BTW.

However, my main associations while driving along the A7 towards Fulda were two German post-apocalyptic YA novels, Die letzten Kinder von Schewenborn (The Last Children of Schewenborn, 1983) and Die Wolke (The Cloud, 1987) by Gudrun Pausewang. Both books were ubiquitous if you were a kid in (West) Germany in the 1980s and 1990s, frequently assigned in schools and also showing up as gifts in the hand of that one relative who kept up with award-winning children’s books (in my case, it was my German teacher cousin). Even if you didn’t read those books yourself, you knew someone who had.

The Last Children of Schewenborn is about nuclear war randomly breaking out. The first person narrator, a twelve-year-old boy from Frankfurt on Main, is on route to visit his grandparents in the Hessian village of Schewenborn (based on Schlitz, where Gudrun Pausewang lived and worked as a teacher) when the bombs fall. The family survives the initial strike on Fulda and make it to Schewenborn, but over the course of the book everybody except the narrator and his father dies in various horrible ways.

Because nuking her hometown once wasn’t enough, Gudrun Pausewang did it again four years later in The Cloud. This time around, the culprit is a Chernobyl scale nuclear disaster at the nuclear power station Grafenrheinfeld in Northern Bavaria. Indeed, Gudrun Pausewang was one of the guests at the decommissioning ceremony of the Grafenrheinfeld power station in 2015. The protagonist is a fourteen-year-old girl who’s at school when the sirens go off. Her parents are in Schweinfurt for the day, which just happens to be next to Grafenrheinfeld, and the protagonist is left alone with her younger brother in Schlitz, which actually gets to be Schlitz this time around. The protagonist and her brother try to make it on bikes to the train station in Bad Hersfeld to escape on the last train before the fallout – the titular cloud – arrives in Schlitz, but neither of them makes it. Once again, pretty much everybody in the book except for the protagonist dies in various horrible ways. The Cloud even had a movie adaptation in 2006, where the sirens literally go off when the heroine first kisses the boy of her dreams.

The Last Children of Schewenborn and The Cloud must be two of the bleakest and most depressing books ever written. They’re also very much works of their time, capturing popular anxieties of the 1980s. Revisiting them as an adult, I’m also stunned by how graphic they are. The various grisly deaths and injuries are described in loving detail, dogs, children and even babies are killed on the page (indeed, the one scene from The Last Children of Schewenborn that everybody remembers is how the narrator’s father kills his newborn baby sister, because she’s deformed and they don’t have milk to feed her). I could never imagine scenes like those even in the bleakest of American YA books.

And based on the ages of the protagonists and also the writing – no romance and a strong family focus, only to kill off everybody – these books are closer to what we’d consider Middle Grade today rather YA. Indeed, recently pedagogues issues a warning that The Last Children of Schewenborn shouldn’t be read by elementary school kids, i.e. ages 6 to 10. I have recommended these books to adults with the warning that they’re massively depressing and would never recommend them to anybody under 16 or so.

The books are also so didactic and message heavy that you dislike them even if you agree with the message, which I do. There’s also a lot of stuff that’s just plain wrong, particularly in The Cloud, where soldiers shoot civilians trying to escape irradiated Schweinfurt, because they’re so fatally irradiated they would pose a risk to everybody else and would just die anyway, since they received lethal doses, and where protagonist Janna-Berta spends much of the book bald, because she lost her hair due to radiation sickness. This is complete nonsense – there are people alive today who were on the premises of the Chernobyl power station during the meltdown as well as plenty of people who lived in Pripyat. And while many people died or got cancer, no one lost their hair except for the worst affected plant workers and firemen. Soviet soldiers also did not shoot civilians in Pripyat, though they did shoot pets and domestic animals. To be fair, a lot of this wasn’t known in 1987, but I do remember many children from irradiated Ukraine and Belarus receiving treatment in German hospitals in the late 1980s and early 1990s and if they were bald, it was from chemotherapy, not radiation.

The real town of Schlitz is famous for five castles in various states of ruin in the area and bills itself as “the romantic castle city”. However, to someone my age seeing the name Schlitz on a highway exit sign only conjures up images of death, destruction and nuclear holocaust. I guess Schlitz’s tourism marketing is very grateful to former resident Gudrun Pausewang. Meanwhile, the spa town of Bad Hersfeld conjures up images of people, including children, getting graphically trampled to death while trying to catch the last train out of the nuclear hellscape.

Autobahn A66 and the Kinzig Valley

I finally made it to Fulda without getting nuked and changed onto Autobahn A66 for the last leg of my journey to Hanau.  This part of the A66 is fairly new, built between the 1990s and 2014, though it roughly follows the medieval trade and pilgrimage route known as Via Regia, the Royal Highway. Indeed, part of the A66 is so new that my aging car GPS (which can’t be updated anymore – I asked) doesn’t recognise it.

Shortly after Fulda, I drove through the 1.6 kilometer long Neuhof tunnel and then through the Kinzig valley on the same route that the armies of the Warsaw Pact were once assumed to take towards Frankfurt and that the armies of Napoleon actually did take. I guess that’s probably also why the Hanau-Fulda leg of the A66 wasn’t finished until after the Fall of the Wall – they didn’t want to make it too easy for the Soviets and besides, there wasn’t a lot of traffic eastwards in this area anyway, because the East German border was so close.

Once I changed onto the A66, I didn’t recognise any of the town names on the exit signs at all, even though there were quite a few exits and towns. One thing I did recognise was the massive headquarters with factory and outlet center of the Engelbert Strauss company, a popular manufacturer of workwear and protective gear. My Dad never bought Engelbert Strauss products for some reason, but plenty of gardeners, handymen, etc.. do wear their gear, particularly the younger ones, because their stuff looks pretty cool by workwear standards. I never knew where the company headquarters was, though, and neither did my neighbour Vladimir, who is an eager customer of their products.

The other thing I recognised were the Spessart mountains and woodlands to the south of the Autobahn. Because the Spessart is rather famous, both as a destination for hiking and nature holidays and because it’s the setting of the fairy tale collection The Spessart Inn by Wilhelm Hauff, which was adapted into a delightful movie in 1958, which I reviewed here. If Fulda and Schlitz are associated with nuclear war, the Spessart is associated with robbers. The robbers actually did exist, largely because the Spessart was a poor region and many people were depserate, though they were a far cry from the romantic robbers of the movie.

I finally made it to Hanau at shortly before eleven AM, i.e. I’d been on the road for a little under six hours, though stopping for coffee, breakfast and a toilet break means the actual driving time was more like five hours.

As for the con, that will be covered in the next post.