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Author Florian Werner: He feels strange in this place
Photo:
Christian Werner
The pandemic arouses strange longings.
Obviously, the virus not only infects our bodies, but also our thoughts and feelings.
And so it can happen that you want to go from the couch to the office these days - or, even more daring, to a motorway service station.
If you can't get anywhere anymore, at least you would like to be on the road again.
The writer Florian Werner, 49, has now published a declaration of love to the rest stop, a book of longing about a place from which everyone just longs to get away in normal times.
The rest stop: This is the break in the process, a place of necessity.
We stop at rest stops because we have to, for example to the toilet.
"There are restaurants that never have a guest unless they are motorway service stations," sang the Blattuß brothers, a stupid group, as early as the 1980s.
Icon: enlargePhoto: Christian Werner
There are around 430 motorway service stations in Germany today.
"In a self-confessed motorist nation like Germany, they are perhaps the most important buildings of all," writes Werner and claims that a visit to a rest stop can tell us more about the culture of this country and its inhabitants than a visit to Cologne Cathedral.
Forty tons and other dinosaurs
Werner recently wrote a book about parenting as a philosophical adventure, together with his wife, the philosopher Svenja Flaßpöhler.
Now he stays for days in the motel at the Garbsen Nord service station, located on the A2 near Hanover, "a place of ravishing mediocrity, a dream in eight and fifteen, normality turned asphalt." Photos by photographer Christian Werner illustrate the sadness very nicely.
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Gas station at the Garbsen Nord motorway service station
Photo: Christian Werner
Forty-tonne diesels outside, inside in the foyer there is a Telekom payphone, and it quickly becomes clear to Werner that the service area, this sanctuary for motorized individual traffic, is a place in yesterday.
How fitting that an artificial bird pelvic dinosaur sits enthroned on the roof of the rest house.
Werner, the Berlin writer, the former Walddorf kindergarten visitor and graduate of a humanistic grammar school, the vegetarian of opinion makes no secret of the fact that he feels strange in this place.
But who feels at home in a non-place like this?
The rest stop is a place of transit that almost everyone has come to go.
With the bike on the acceleration lane
Icon: enlargePhoto: Christian Werner
Werner meets the man who is the exception: Marc Münnich, the facility's franchisee.
He is the third generation of the motorway restaurateur and therefore grew up on the service area.
As a six-year-old, he used the children's bike to heat over the acceleration lane and did his homework in the children's play area of the rest area restaurant.
There was never a lack of other children, just stupid that they all had to move on after 45 minutes.
Werner's book is largely a service station report.
He also speaks to a truck driver, to an emergency chaplain and to a motorway policeman, to a bottle collector.
He takes a look at Garbsen Nord's guest book.
"In such a case it means: Thank you for everything," writes Uwe Seeler there.
And the polite TV chef Alfred Biolek declares that he got his money's worth in culinary terms: "Thanks for the good pudding!"
As if the rest stop had been cut out of the world
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Photography from the book "The Raststätte - A Declaration of Love"
Photo: Christian Werner
But Werner only really gets going in the philosophical chapters, in which he leans on thinkers like the French anthropologist Marc Augé, who once developed a theory of so-called non-places.
"When the traveler gets out of his car, one leg is still in his private vehicle," writes Werner.
"You are there and yet you are not, you are cut off from the reality around it." As if the rest stop had been cut out of the world.
And so after getting out of the car, people stretch and stretch as if they were alone.
"The usual rules of living together are overridden here."
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The rest stop: a declaration of love
Authors: Florian Werner, Christian Werner (photographer)
Published by Hanser Berlin
Number of pages: 192
Authors: Florian Werner, Christian Werner (photographer)
Published by Hanser Berlin
Number of pages: 192
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Werner did research in the summer of 2019, i.e. in the summer before Corona.
The journey has continued since then, exit uncertain.
But his project makes it even more appealing: a book of longing for times when hardly anyone is allowed to socialize with anyone, for times, one could joke, when everyone only socialized with each other at a distance.
It is part of the nature of rest stops to slow down people.
The rest stop is a niche only in space and time, "that is neither there nor already, this is the rest stop," Ferdinand Schmalz once wrote, the Austrian playwright and Bachmann Prize winner.
It sounds like a paraphrase of the corona feeling.
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