“Notice how GPS never says, ‘You made a mistake?’ It says, ‘Recalculating.’ Every misstep is just part of finding your way. Maybe that’s the mindset we all need.” ~ Unknown
brothers in Germany
Continuing to troll through old photos, I came across this picture of Hero with his brother, Phillip, near Schweinfurt, Germany, where Hero and Shero lived while he was stationed at the Schweinfurt U.S. Army Garrison in the early 1960s. This photo was taken while Shero was in Schweinfurt, roughly between March 1963 and November 1964, when Phillip, who was serving in one of the three branches of the military during his career, was stationed somewhere in Europe, had weekend leave, and came for a visit. That’s all I remember of what Shero told me about the photo. Once more, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find this exact location in Schweinfurt today, thanks to Google Street View. The Ludwigstraße in Schweinfurt is a short street, only seven blocks long, on the western side of Schweinfurt, with some of its architecture dating from the time when this area was part of the Bavarian Kingdom. This photo looks relatively rural to me, but today, in this same general area, where the Ludwigstaße intersects with the curving road leading into Schweinfurt city center, is far more developed and hardly resembles the land as it existed over 60 years ago. The other end of the street is the same; more modern developments, far less rural. I find this interesting because, in between coughing bouts, I’ve been working on a paper and presentation on how the character of a place changes through its architecture, and the ramifications of that on our identity and connection to Place. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a sudden change, as we see with a natural disaster, but there is quite a bit of change in this small area of Schweinfurt in just 60 years. That’s still a pretty short period of time, by time’s standards. I’d love to know what native Schweinfurtians think of their city’s development. For me, and I own that I might be biased here, I’d be a lot more interested in exploring the Schweinfurt of Shorty and Phillip’s era than today. Give me the dirt footpath over a sidewalk any day.
Ludwigstraße 2022
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