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AUTOREN EXTRA / Jubiläum
Pedro Silmon
Nur bei schoenem Wetter
While we were still in our teens my girlfriend, Lesley
– now, my long-time wife – introduced me to the
English Lake District. As a child, on camping and
caravanning holidays with her parents and their friends, she had
often visited this ruggedly beautiful area of deep, glacial lakes,
high hills and rivers in the north west. Up until the 18th century
townspeople had been afraid to venture there, then William
Wordsworth wrote poems about it and made them curious. On
our visits, most of the time it was cold and it rained but we were
in love and wore waterproof clothing and hiking boots so we just
didn't care.
**********
I
had never visited Germany, when, married with two
daughters, aged 7 and 10, and having lived and worked in
London for 20 years, I was offered a job in Munich. Clive,
a friend and my former boss who was moving back to the UK,
whom I would be taking over from at a well-known publishing
company in Bavaria's capital city, kindly invited me to stay
with him and his family for a couple of days, when I came over
for the interview one Friday afternoon in late September, 1995.
Their traditional Bavarian house,
behind the Tutzinger Hof in a
quiet corner of Starnberg was
tiny and like something out of
a child's storybook. 'Yes, it's
too small for us, but it's so
beautiful that we just had to
take it!' they told me, laughing
and smiling at one another, at
their son and at me. Sadly, I
knew it would never be big
enough for us.
Although I had looked at an
atlas before expressing my
interest in the job I arrived in Starnberg
by car in the evening and didn't see the lake. I wasn't sure what to
expect. The following morning: warm with a light breeze; the sky
an oddly intense, bright blue. Clive and I entered the pedestrian
tunnel that runs below the railway tracks that separate the town
from the Starnberger See. Emerging, faced with the vast panorama,
I was stunned. The sheer scale was overwhelming. A blue and
white pleasure steamer was filling up with passengers; sunlight
reflected brightly off the wakes of a few white-sailed yachts that
barely scratched the smooth surface of the huge expanse of water.
The colossal mountains, their every detail clearly visible through
the slight, distant haze seemed to hover over the tiny cluster of
buildings at the opposite end of the lake as if about to crush
them. 'It's often like this when there's a Foehn', Clive explained,
cryptically, 'Something to do with warm air coming over the Alps
from Italy... and, if your head's hurting this morning it's probably
got nothing to do with the Augustiner beer we were drinking last
night, it's more probably attributable to the Foehn.'
**********
Why do you want to live in Starnberg?' the editor-inchief
enquired when I arrived to start my new job the
following January, 'a friend of mine has a nice house
in Nymphenburg you could rent.' I had returned home after the
interview the previous September, and told Lesley that the region
was just like the Lake District but on a far grander scale: that it
didn't rain as much; about the mythical Foehn and about the
delightful Munich International School which I'd been shown
around. 'I just know my wife will love it', I replied, 'and it's very
close to the MIS where we'll be sending our children,' I told her.
It would certainly be well worth the daily commute for the weekends
at the lake.
Throughout the weeks that followed, speaking no more than the
few words of German I had learnt from a
cassette on the daily commute to
my job in London, each weekend
I hired a small car and drove from
Munich, where I had been put up
temporarily by the company in a
cosy Munich apartment, to Starnberg
in a vain attempt to find a place
for myself and my family to live.
Everywhere was covered in a thick
blanket of snow. I looked at details
of countless numbers of houses and
apartments in every Makler's window
in the town and visited every village
within a 10-15 kilometre radius of
the northern end of the lake, the names
of which I couldn't even pronounce: Gauting, Pöcking, Berg,
Schäftlarn, Icking and many others that were even smaller.
Having had no luck myself the company eventually found
another temporary apartment for us in Feldafing, which was
where I headed for after I picked my wife and daughters up from
München Franz Josef Strauß airport the mid-February afternoon
when, tired and bewildered, they arrived. Starnberg and the
Starnberger See didn't disappoint. The sun, very low in the sky,
cast a purple light across the water, Schloss Starnberg was floodlit
and warm yellow lights glowed in every window below each
Fotos: Pedro Silmon
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