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Frankfurt (Oder) in fall

Lately I’ve been visiting Frankfurt (Oder) on a few occasions, a town on the German border with Poland, that I happen to have grown up in. A short reflection on memory, roots, and the seasons of life.

Back in the times of the German Democratic Republic, Frankfurt used to have about 87,000 inhabitants. Today, this number is about to fall below 60,000. I never thought of Frankfurt as a beautiful city, even by East German standards. Back then, it was a city that you got moved to, not something you chose. Still, with a state run electronics factory employing more than 8,000 people, it had something of an industrial center, at least in my childhood memories.

Now, everytime I go back, I’m simply amazed. Frankfurt is the antithesis of urbanity: quiet, small, green, peaceful, orderly, charming. Beautifully situated by the Oder river, a gateway to Poland, it even has a modern little university, yet appears agreeably empty. The embodiment of a controlled, beautiful fall: Man shaping nature’s reclaiming of urban space.

Man shaping nature's reclaiming of urban space

Personally, I come to Frankfurt occasionally to see my grandma, who still lives there. She bemoans the town’s downfall in terms of human interest. I can see how it can be bewildering to see all blocks around your own demolished just to make way for parks and meadows. Still, from the outside, there is a quiet peace about it all, one is reminded of how what goes up must come down, a central Buddhist tenet that is beautifully expressed in Baroque poet Andreas Gryphius’ poem Es ist alles eitel.

In the summer however, I was also there for a class reunion. We left Frankfurt (Oder) in 1991, when I was just 13 years old. Meeting some of my class mates 18 years later proved quite a profound and enjoyable experience. In fact, I had a hard time recognizing anyone at first. Then, recollection came back in waves. After about an hour, it was crystal clear who these people were, in fact they looked and behaved pretty much as they had 18 years ago. Clearly, they had all wised up quite a bit, gotten much cooler and even friendlier, but I could still recognize the faces, the roles they played, a core in people that had not changed a lot in all these years. And it seemed the same the other way around. What struck me most is the way that, after a few hours, we could talk in a very familiar language, one that I have never felt I could talk with friends from the regions I have moved to since. There is some intimate connection, some degree of understanding with the people you have grown up with, and I felt this most clearly in the subtle language patterns, the way they think about the world, even though I have not spoken in this way, and thought in many other ways, for such a long time. It was a feeling of home that took me by surprise.

The stories that were told also reminded me of these trying times, as an adolescent in a time of uncertainty, the usual struggle between childhood and growing up compounded by the external vanishing of a trusted system into something new and exciting that you had learned could not be trusted. I hadn’t thought of this period for a long time, and maybe it was a good thing that I had been forced to leave in the middle of this turmoil. These were stories of a time where as a young person, you had no values to adhere to or even rebel against, where it seemed that nobody cared if you became a skinhead, went to jail, beat your teachers or fell prey to drugs. I’m not sure if I would have been one of the survivors I met, grown from the experience, or one of the casualties left behind somewhere. It is miraculous to me how time has turned chaos, confused teenagers in a city patrolled by Nazi gangs, into serenity, strong and inspired adults in a quiet town peacefully fading into calm insignificance. A powerful lesson in “this too shall pass”.

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Lately I’ve been visiting Frankfurt (Oder) on a few occasions, a town on the German border with Poland, that I happen to have grown up in. A short reflection on...