Germany Remains Under-Developed

Bob Keller is a retired university professor and an historian who edited the photo essay “Whatcom Places” published by the Whatcom Land Trust (1997). He resides in Fairhaven.

This past fall my wife and I moved temporarily to southwestern Germany to share a young couple’s home located between two dairy farms. This region must be like America 200 years ago. Neighbors buy potatoes, cabbage, squash and eggs from a Gemuse Mann (vegetable peddler) who delivers to the door. Fresh cider is sold at apple orchards, while milk and cream are dispensed next to the cow (which is sort of embarrassing).

Even though this might seem convenient and idyllic, “back to the land,” in truth living sandwiched between two active dairies proved utterly impossible. We have learned why real estate developers rightly strive to eliminate farms and to convert such wasteland to civilized purposes.

If you live beside a farm, or at least a dairy farm, all night and day long you sniff, taste, and breathe manure. Manure, commonly called cow dung, sometimes has an odor so thick that you can almost chew it. Despite the stench, during our first August night in Oberried we opened a bedroom window to relieve the heat, only to be invaded by 800 black barn flies. Insects do not respect property rights. They don’t stay down on the farm where they belong.

A farmer’s day is not 8-5, but 5-8, early morning to night seven days a week, work, work, work. Watching endless physical labor makes a retired university professor feel lazy, or like a wimp if wedded to an office computer. Worst of all, beginning at 5:00 a.m. or earlier, and continuing all day, a farm makes lots of noise, noise not only from romantic roosters, but from tractors, trucks, backhoes, harvesters, bawling calves, cowbells on their mothers, grunting hogs, mules, steers, sheep and goats. In the middle of night you may be shocked awake by screams and screeches as an owl dismembers a rabbit.

German farmers leave mud on the road, block traffic, and, despite all their own manure, dislike dogs that defecate in fields. Farm families here cram three extended generations into a single unhealthy household, violating the American Christian ideal of the family as just mom, dad and the kids. German farms apparently do not mind if foreign hikers wander the trails that crisscross their land, thus degrading sacrosanct principles of private property rights.

In Germany, where over 82 million people live on only 135,000 square miles (roughly Oregon and Washington combined), we do not find modern suburbs, commercial strips or five-acre housing tracts. Over here the cows and trees apparently have a claim on all open space. A modest city like Freiburg (pop. 150,000) in the Black Forest suddenly halts at its city limits where farms and vistas take over. Instead of modern Lynnwood, Bellevue, Issaquah, Sudden Valley, Cordata and our Guide, the Black Forest has small compact villages like Oberried, Wagensteig and Buchenbach sprinkled across the landscape.

After centuries of human habitation, not to mention wars, the Black Forest of southwest Germany remains primitive, rural, stinky and under-developed, still dominated by orchards, vineyards, cornfields and cows. Local laws combine with taxes and land protection rules to create a paper nightmare for aspiring developers. It is time, in this visitor’s opinion, for old Germany to stop resisting progress. It should enter the 20th century, at least, and replace those cows and cornfields with condos, supermarkets, a few malls, and clean, restful cookie-cutter tracts.