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Farewell to the phone booth

2022-12-30T05:39:03.279Z


Farewell to the phone booth Created: 12/30/2022, 06:30 By: Felicitas Bogner One of the last telephone pillars in the district is located in the Tölz bathing area. "The entire service will be discontinued by the end of January," said Telekom. © proehl Most communities in the district have not had one for years. In Lenggries and Kochel, too, the last telephone booths have now been dismantled. Te


Farewell to the phone booth

Created: 12/30/2022, 06:30

By: Felicitas Bogner

One of the last telephone pillars in the district is located in the Tölz bathing area.

"The entire service will be discontinued by the end of January," said Telekom.

© proehl

Most communities in the district have not had one for years.

In Lenggries and Kochel, too, the last telephone booths have now been dismantled.

Telekom has now announced that the remaining public telephones, for example in Tölz, should also disappear.

The end of an era awakens nostalgic feelings.

Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen – The heavy door opened with a black handle.

A mostly rather unpleasant smell greeted you as soon as you entered the phone booth.

The receiver was hung on a silver box, and a tattered phone book was found somewhere underneath.

Then, over 20 years ago, the massive yellow cells gave way to narrow silver-pink telephone pillars.

But these too will soon disappear completely.

There was only little turnover per year

They were no longer economically viable.

“The demand for public telephones has been declining for years.

They have been dismantled in agreement with the municipalities for years," says Markus Jodl, spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, on request.

This is clearly noticeable in the communities in the southern district.

"Benediktbeuern is cell-free," says Diana Zander from the municipal administration.

The same applies to Wackersberg.

According to Elisabeth Danzer from the municipal administration, the last public telephones were at the chapel in Arzbach and in Wackersberg-Dorf near Kirchstrasse.

“They were then converted to emergency telephones.

But these have also been dismantled since 2013,” says Danzer.

In Greiling, Reichersbeuern, Sachsenkam, Gaißach and Bad Heilbrunn there have long been no more public telephones.

In Lenggries, the last telephone pillars were on Isarplatz, on Münchner Strasse and on Rathausplatz.

"The turnover here was only a few euros per year," says Tobias Riesch, manager of the municipality.

It is therefore hardly surprising that these were also dismantled a few weeks ago, as Riesch explains.

Kochler municipal council disagreed with Telekom

In Kochel am See, the joy about the planned dismantling a year ago was not great.

"The municipal council objected to the dismantling in a resolution dated January 25, because in our opinion the public telephones have an important emergency call function and are used for the necessary public telecommunications," explains Thomas Holz, Mayor of Kochl.

However, this had no effect.

"As far as we know, the last telephone exchanges have now been dismantled," explains the mayor.

Telekom: Dismantling in Tölz completed by 2025

Only in Bad Tölz can the old columns still be found - at the Kurhaus and in the bathing area.

A relic.

Because: "In mid-November, coin payment was deactivated everywhere and the entire service will be discontinued by the end of January," Jodl announces.

It is not certain when the last Tölzer telephone columns will be dismantled.

According to the company spokesman, the dismantling will be completed by the beginning of 2025.

It's the end of an era that makes some people feel nostalgic.

For example, there was a telephone box that was familiar to many in Jachenau next to Peter Krauss's village shop.

"We had a payphone and a phone booth with a card next to the store," says Krauss.

The payphone disappeared about 15 years ago.

"A few years later the other cell was also removed." Before the spread of mobile phones, the phones were "used a lot".

Above all, people who drove through the Jachenau would have taken advantage of the offer.

"If someone had a breakdown here, it was worth a lot," says Krauss.

Monika Dahlberg used the cells on tour

The yellow cells were also of immense value to the actress Monika Dahlberg, who lives in Benediktbeuern.

"I've been on tour a lot because of the theatre," explains the 86-year-old.

"The first thing we did when we arrived in a place was to look for payphones," recalls Dahlberg.

"In the 1960s it was the only way to call home.

Which was essential for me as a mother.” There were telephones in the hotels, but: “It was much more expensive to make a call there.” Extensive chatting on the line?

That didn't exist at that time.

"Either you called because something important happened, or you just checked to see if everything was ok.

Every minute cost money.”

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District Administrator Josef Niedermaier remembers that the yellow boxes played an essential role, especially for guests in Bad Tölz.

“There was a whole range of telephones at the Kurhaus.

In the afternoon, queues of spa guests formed in front of it," reports the Tölzer.

When he was in the States for a longer period of time in 1988, he used the US phone booths to call home.

"But just like here, the quality of life in there wasn't really inviting," he says.

From the 1990s, public payphones became less and less important.

“In 1993 I had my first car phone and a little later my first mobile phone.

It was a huge, thick Motorola, you could almost kill someone with it,” says Niedermaier and laughs.

Telephone booth in the Jachenau served as a popular photo motif

At the same time, the cells in the Jachenau also went downhill.

Krauss recalls with amusement that in her last years the telephone booths mainly attracted younger clientele: "You could occasionally see young people stopping to take pictures of themselves at the telephone booths."

In the transition phase - from the telephone booth to the mobile phone - the successful series "Der Bulle von Tölz" was filmed in the spa town.

Leading actor Ottfried Fischer was already state of the art in 1995.

"I didn't need a phone booth anymore during the shooting in Tölz, at the beginning I had a car phone and then soon a cell phone," he says.

Nevertheless, the cells were still a common motif during filming, reports production manager Robert Müller.

Ruth Drexl, who embodied Resi Berghammer in the series, made a call in the episode "Rote Rosen" in a telephone booth on Flinthöhe by the swimming pool.

In the same episode, actress Sarah Camp used a phone booth in Bad Tölz to call the police.

Nice memories of a means of communication that - so are fishermen,

You can find more current news from the region around Bad Tölz at Merkur.de/Bad Tölz.

Source: merkur

All news articles on 2022-12-30

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