And now the last workplace beer has been drunk, probably with a cocked arm and a sigh of pleasure, and it’s getting on for two in the afternoon, and Uncle J clocks off from his shift in the proper manner and has three quarters of an hour to spare before the train to Bad Nauheim, before the rest of his day begins, to be filled with all kinds of wonderful things that he’s probably already imagining to himself. The Frauenwald forest with its wildlife and deer stands and Forsthaus Winterstein. His digestive system has probably already processed the beer, for it was only sustenance after all, they were working hard hauling the packages around. Maybe there’s just a hint of intoxication now, a light shroud over everything. And so into the last three quarters of an hour and maybe off to the train station forecourt, one last cigarette with his workmates while staring off into nothingness or into the distance like the Marlboro man (depending on how you interpret the Marlboro man’s gaze). It made them feel secure, their depression lifted. Then my uncle sets off, heading across Kaiserstrasse to Theaterplatz once more. I always picture him walking there, the aged child. Hunched over slightly, his shoulders raised, or rather his head sunk down between them, hands in his pockets, wearing a kind of chapka in winter but with artificial padding instead of fur — it seems to me that he always wore the same thing throughout his entire life. Most of the time you would see him from behind, not the front, while he stood before things like shop windows, construction site machinery or trams, while he stared through windowpanes at displays or the instruments of coveted automobiles, always the latest and newest. The admiration always moved in one direction only, through and out of his eyes. If a Harley-Davidson drove past, he would admire it (despite the fact that it was American). If a Porsche drove past, he would admire it. He was allowed to have his VW Variant, at least. It was another sanctuary of his. He had this Driving-It-Into-The-Garage ceremony: the automobile would stay in the courtyard and wouldn’t be driven into the garage right away, for my uncle liked to prolong the anticipation and make the whole thing more intense. First he would go into the house, first he would drink another beer, all the while turning over the imminent, important act in his mind: that the automobile still needed to be driven into the garage, for the evening, for the night, because the automobile had to go into the garage. As if it were his little moon rocket, or his very own tank in Russia (you have to look after such things, they need to go into the garage at night, even nowadays, just like a child needs to go to bed). Who knows, perhaps J would have liked to have put a uniform on for Driving-It-Into-The-Garage, one specially made for the occasion. In any case, he felt ennobled by the act, and would always announce it so that everyone in the house knew: The Variant was about to be driven into the garage. And once it was in there, the world was in order. The day could continue and the celebration had been celebrated.
There were significantly more varieties of automobiles being driven around in Frankfurt than in Bad Nauheim in the Wetterau, especially at the end of the sixties. Many models didn’t even make it out to the countryside at all, and around the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof where J worked, the cars were always the biggest and most expensive and swankiest, for obvious reasons, which meant that my uncle could stare his eyes clean out of his head and admire them to his heart’s content. He would stop in his tracks and stare at the limousines as they drove past, right up until the objects of his desire had disappeared around the corner or into the distance and were no longer visible. Besides the Catholic religion he had been raised in, my uncle was also a devotee of the Faster-Higher-Further religion, which was almost universal at the time. It applied to automobiles and weapons and space rockets, and of course to buildings too, particularly building sites, because buildings that were in the process of being built were even more fascinating than those that were already there. He discussed building construction in much the same tone as others would talk about a pregnancy. Look how fast it’s growing! And how hard they’re all working! And look at the equipment they have! And how many floors there will be! I mean, try to imagine for a moment the austerity of the era in which my uncle lived in Frankfurt. There was nothing there then, nothing but the Henninger Tower — although that did have a revolving restaurant. Then, later, there was the TV tower, but other than that Frankfurt was almost completely flat. The high rise buildings came much later, and J was still around to see some of them. He was still around to see the Messeturm too. He certainly spent lots of time there, and so close to the train station! Just a ten minute walk and you could be standing at the construction site of a building which you knew would later be the tallest in the whole of Europe. My uncle, standing there at the perimeter fence, knew it too. Not a big building, not just any old building, but the biggest. The immense excavation work, the scaffolding, the foundations, everything just a hole at first (full of foreign workers, but with a German foreman), everyone in their place, everyone knowing what they had to do, from early in the morning on the construction site of Europe’s highest tower, which for now is still only a hole. Off towards the back stands the foreman, his blueprints unrolled, gesturing here and there with his outstretched arm, standing like a general, perhaps much like Uncle J’s father in the family business, or like Rommel in the desert. Then the foundations are laid (a thousand bars peeping out of the concrete, everything to plan), and then it goes quicker and quicker, floor by floor, and my uncle has to visit more and more frequently, so as not to miss anything — everything is important and of great significance, then you can say that you were there, at the biggest, most important construction site in Europe, you can tell people about it at home, in the Wetterau, in Forsthaus Winterstein. And by now the tower can be seen from a distance, although it’s just a stump, and the foreman is still standing up there with his blueprints and pointing here and there (my uncle can’t see him anymore, but he imagines the foreman, nothing would work without him after all). And then you can see the tower from the train, on the journey from the Wetterau to Frankfurt am Main, already half the height it will eventually be, but my uncle is a pensioner by then and no longer travelling into Frankfurt but staying at home instead, no longer allowed to smoke because of his legs (now only drinking beer), but if you were to drive the now run-down Variant towards the Forsthaus you would be able to see the Messeturm even from the Wetterau. Sometimes my uncle stops and gets out, standing there in front of his Variant in his snug winter coat, hands in his pockets. There it is in the distance, really tiny, the tallest building in Europe. The Messeturm, and my uncle there too! Albeit only looking at it from the Wetterau. It’s almost impossible to imagine a happier life. And yet, just a few years later, the tower was no longer the tallest building in Europe. But my uncle probably didn’t pick up on that, and if he were standing there today, en route to the Forsthaus, and staring over towards Frankfurt, he would probably get disorientated, unable to tell all the towers apart, the Hessian San Gimignano beyond the expansive fields of the Wetterau, lying there in the distance, small and almost quaint. It’s too much to contemplate how he would have reacted if he had lived to see the bypass, the whole of Wetterau a building site, one big excavation zone; as they demolished his home around him — and perhaps that would have made him love it even more — he could have stood wherever he wanted and he would still have been on a building site. A home not just with a forest and birds and hunting lodges but with a huge building site to go and stand on too, with lots of workers and heavy machinery at every turn. He once brought my mother this wooden plaque as a present, a slice of tree trunk with an inscription written on it using a wire-nib burner (it actually looked really brutal, the kind of burn-mark that’s left behind after you brand a pig; you hear the hiss, and then you’re branded and can never be rid of it again):