20 Years On: Part 5 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

When I had been inter-railing in August/September 1988 I had been conscious of getting too far from the UK so that I could not get back if there was any problem. However, I found that with a base in West Germany I was happier at being in the South of the country than I had been the previous year and wondered if I should always rent a property as a kind of 'bolt hole' when away. Of course I never had the money for such a strange approach, but it is interesting how I had a mental limit to how far I would travel alone without beginning to feel uneasy. At this stage, with the local authorities still holding my passport I was unable to leave West Germany; Becky had had to apply to them specifically to get hers back in order to enter Austria. We followed suit, making up all kinds of excuses for why we needed our passports back. The local authorities were incompetent, because unless I had been able to find a bureau de change which would change money for me without showing my passport as most asked for, I would have run out of money too. In fact they certainly showed the lie of the assumptions about German efficiency. I remember the Post Office being reluctant to give me post with my name on it because my driving licence (like all UK driving licences of the time) did not have my photograph on it and they could not believe that. They found out I was correct and had to accept it. I suppose this was a result of being in a suburb, even a well-off one, rather than in the city more used to foreign visitors.

I remember the health authorities were bad in a different way. You used to get a form called an E111 which allowed you free health care across the European Community. In the UK by this stage you got one for life but in West Germany they had a limited duration. I had to stand and make a scene in the health office for them to return it to me. They said it had expired and I said, if that was the case, then why did they need to keep it. They said they had to, but as a consolation offered me a photocopy of my supposedly 'expired' E111. This showed that they had over-stamped it with so many local stamps that many of the details were now illegible so it would have been useless anywhere else. At that stage I gave up and applied for another E111 when I got back to the UK. I wonder if my E111 is still lodged in that local office and whether I can go and view it in 2020 when the thirty-year secrecy limit has expired.

The man who drove me back to Köln took advantage of the unlimited speeds on the German autobahns (in those days most of which were still only two lanes) and was regularly doing in excess of 190 Kph. We passed a BMW which had hit the central reservation at such a speed that its engine had been gouged out and was left separate from the rest of the car which was turned to face the wrong way into the traffic some metres further on. The driver (I was in the passenger seat, another hitch-hiker, a woman was in the rear) thought I was tired as I kept my eyes closed most of the way, but that was from fear. He covered two-thirds of the length of West Germany in five hours. I have never got farther North in Germany than Essen in the Ruhr. This was the last hitch-hiking I ever did.

Rather embarrassingly despite having visited Munich three times and having written two novels set there, I cannot identify many of the locations featured in the photos I include here. If anyone can let me know where they are I would be very grateful.

Monday 15th May 1989

Today I woke promptly but dozed after breakfast and then walked to the station from where I caught the 09.59 to München. Becky is leaving Augsburg to travel to Innsbruck to see Ashley. On arriving in München around 10.40 I went to the Mitfahr centre just to the South-East of the city centre. I had just missed one lift to Köln but there was another at 15.00 so I went by U-Bahn back to the center of the town and walked through the back streets to the Englisches Garten where I had a lunch of sausages and chips, and, of course the compulsory litre of beer. I then walked through the city taking photos and then caught the car, with a woman as well, to Köln. The weather was much better [by now]. We arrived at 20.30, the driver having gone very fast. The total cost was DM45,- each. Dad said I should travel on a bit but I only have DM170,- left in cash and I have done most of the South of West Germany. I think I will use the Mitfahr to go to the North. I had a MacDonalds then came back. I chatted with Carol then unpacked and talked with Paul, Joss, Fiona and Gabrielle. Then I began reading "The Champion of Garathorn", then letters from "Wirral" Paul and Nick & Julie.

Weather: Sunny and warm, some dull periods.

Opera House [?] in Munich, West Germany in May 1989

Square in Munich, May 1989

Entrance to Weinstraße in Munich, May 1989

Pedestrianised Street in Munich, May 1989

Pagoda in Englisches Garten, Munich, May 1989

Archway Dedicated to the Bavarian Army, Munich, May 1989

Political Posters on Official Noticeboard, Munich, May 1989

I have cropped these two pictures as the background, with numerous men standing around selling cars to each other seemed less interesting than the political posters.

The parties advertised, clockwise, starting at the top left are: CSU [Christian Social Union - the Bavarian branch of the CDU Christian Democratic Union, a conservative party]; SPD [Socialist Party]; No idea, possibly the Grüne Partei [Green Party]; FDP [Free Democratic Party - centrist liberals]; Christliche Mitte [literally Christian Middle presumably a Catholic Party as opposed to the cross-denominational CSU; despite the name it is listed as being right-wing]; Christliche Liga [literally Christian League]; ODP [the Ecological Democratic Party, a green party]; Bayernpartei [The Bavaria Party].

The back of the noticeboard had the more extreme parties advertised, left to right are: DVU [German People's Union - Nationalist]; Die Republikaner [The Republicans - an extreme right-wing party who were gaining strength at the time], FAP [Free Workers' Party - I can find no details about this party, but I assume given the name it was another far right party], MLPD [Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany - a Communist Party; many of the other extreme left parties are missing probably certain of gaining few votes in conservative Bavaria].

20 Years On: Part 4 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

This day showed again the difficulty of keeping yourself occupied in a town on a Sunday when you must be out of your hostel room for the bulk of the day. I fell back on the staple of German life on a Sunday - museums and the cinema. The Fuggerei is an alms village in the city built by the Fuggers, leading bankers of the Middle Ages. The others had gone to the famous castle of Neuschwanstein but there was not enough room for me in the car. Yugoslavia was still in existence at the time of this trip, hence the Yugoslav restaurant.


This day was also a bit of a revelation for me about things. Becky's initial conversation had been at a meal between four of us [with a gay man Paul and a straight lothario, Nick] some days before. Of course, just six weeks off an abandoned suicide attempt and feeling constantly 'a stranger in a strange land', homesick but not keen to return to the house with the landlord's step-daughter and concerned about my future, it is not surprising I was introspective. I suppose also I did not have the usual disasters of my holidays to preoccupy me. It shows that at 21, how naive I was, it was to be another 13 years before I would have sex. I had forgotten this was my attitude at the time, but it explains why I turned down Liz's wish for an encounter later on during this period in Köln. I also realise that quite expecting to have killed myself before I had finished my degree I had made no plans for what to do after university which is one reason why I was so ill-equipped when I graduated and so mucked up any potential career path.


Sunday 14th May 1989
Today I woke promptly and had a day to "do" Augsburg and I did it quite well. It was pouring with rain so first I hung around until the museums opened at 10.00. I first look around the Roman museum, not even mentioned in the Michelin guide. Then I went onto the city gallery. After looking at the Rathaus I went to the Maximillian museum before lunch in MacDonalds. Then I went to the cinema and saw „Zwillinge” ['Twins'] which was easy to follow and was funny. Then, as the weather had got better I went to the Fuggerei and the museum there, then to [Berthold] Brecht's house. I came back to the youth hostel and watched a little television.


I know I have been going on about the impact Becky's revelations had but what she has done is shown me that normal, non-flirty, intelligent people can have pleasant sex within a relationship which has wiped out some of the unpleasantness and sordidness I saw around sex, and to see it just as an extension of embraces and kissing, not something apart.


Also with Becky's conversation on plans for the time after leaving university and even about retiring, has been useful as previously this was a void for me and thus a source of worry. I think this trip down here was good for me and I have seen another nice town.


Tomorrow is both a Monday and a bank holiday. All the sights are closed in München on Mondays anyway but I have found that the 'Mitfahr' offices are open so I can look around them, there may be a lot of demands for lifts to Köln but maybe I can go tomorrow or on Tuesday. There are three offices in München and which I am going to by train. I just hope that there is room in the youth hostel.



I caught the tram and the bus to the Studentenwohnheim hoping to get something on the way but everything was shut. I got there by 19.00 and met up with Becky, Diana, Sara, Breda, Debbie, Karl, Paul and the others. We sat talking for a while and then went to a good Yugoslav restaurant, where we had pola-pola for nine (the German had something different). It consisted of a plate of meat, sausage, vegetables and salad. Then I came back just getting to the youth hostel in time [before the doors were closed for curfew].


Weather: Rainy at first, sunny later.

Rathaus [Town Hall] in Augsburg, West Germany in May 1989

Pedestrianised Street in Augsburg, May 1989

River Running Outside Front Doors close to Berthold Brecht's House, Augsburg, May 1989

Entrance to the Fuggerei Alms 'Village', Augsburg, May 1989

20 Years On: Part 3 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

On this day I finally got to Augsburg, a town I had missed the previous September and I was pleased I did. I remember my underwear being strapped to the back of my rucksack smelling so much that I had to shove it inside as the woman offering us the 'Mitfahr' had read the slip wrong and had expected three women and was unimpressed by having to take one ugly-looking foreign man (she had expected Germans) who had to have everything translated for him by the others. She wanted to abandon me but Becky persuaded her and, of course, I paid up as agreed. I sat silently in the back of the car while Becky kept her entertained with her usual very jolly manner in good German.

I remember the youth hostel being very clean and surprisingly empty. I guess most people do not stop in Augsburg but go on to Munich. I remember the South African woman staying there had the principle when visiting towns of seeing one thing in each, but a different thing in consecutive towns, e.g. a cathedral in the first, a castle in the second, a museum in the third. Of course to fill my days I always saw as much as I could of everything in every town.


In contrast to the student halls in Augsburg, in Köln I was paying about DM247,- per month for just a room (no balcony) with two showers, two toilet cubicles and a kitchen shared between 12 students. This was the first time I had had Weizer beer with a tiny piece of lemon in it from which bubbles stream. In Köln they drank from 0.2 litre glasses or 0.5 litre only if you were drinking Guinness in a specialist pub.




I am reminded by the photo I have uploaded that I always used to be fascinated by taking photos of roads disappearing off into the distance and when cycling northern France was always trying to capture the perfect French tree-lined road. In part I blame the television series 'Secret Army' (1978-9) which started and ended with vistas across the Belgian countryside. It was only in the mid-1990s that someone pointed out to me how dreary this kind of shot was, it showed nothing, not an interesting building or a beautiful landscape. However, I include this photo for completeness and to show the kind of view that, for some reason, fascinated me at the time.


Saturday 13th May 1989
Today I woke promptly again. The youth hostel was filling up with Italians for a function. I went round to Sara's room then we caught the tram into town and met up with the woman who was giving us a lift to Augsburg. We stopped once. It cost DM24,- to register originally and then DM60,- for the petrol.


In Augsburg I walked to the youth hostel which is almost empty and in a pleasant part of town. I had to wait until 17.00 to occupy my room so chatted with a South African woman and a German woman. Then I walked through the centre of the town and got the tram and a bus to the South of the city and went to the hall where Becky's friends are living. Each room has a shower, toilet, cooker, sink and balcony for DM128,- per month. We had a good Mexican meal in the function room. There was an American, a Dane, a German and seven British. After that we went to town, to a quiet pub and drunk half litres of beer and played table football. It was near the youth hostel so I was able to get back in time to have a shower and re-pack my rucksack. Becky seemed much happier this evening, she must be desperate to see Ashley [her boyfriend] but is having a pleasant time now.

Weather: Dull and mild.

Road leading to Youth Hostel in Augsburg, West Germany in May 1989

20 Years On: Part 2 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

From this day in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, I remember Becky being unsettled by how long the eyelashes of Peter, another Briton and boyfriend to Sara, were. I also remember how elegant the trams in the town looked, very 1950s style. Unlike the trams in Köln they only had doors on one side and with the small lamps and tables, they looked like a series of dining cars moving through the evening streets. One part of the route ran across a lawn with grass grown intentionally between the tracks and it looked like the trams were moving over the grass. I had not experienced the delights of tram travel on my previous visit when I had walked everywhere.

'Mitfahr' literally 'with travel' was a sensible scheme to make hitch-hiking safer. There were offices in West German towns and you would go there in the morning saying you wanted to travel to another town and for a fee they would put up your details and people offering lifts would come in and put up their offers too. The office would match you up. The person giving the lift would get a small fee from you for the petrol. You could pick the sort of lift you wanted, in case, say you only wanted to travel with a woman. You were safer as the office kept the details of the driver. In West Germany you have to re-register your car to wherever you live even if you just move a few streets and cross and administrative border, so it is always easy to tell (if you know the town designations on the numberplates and they are easy to guess, B is Berlin, D is Düsseldorf and so on, even the size of the town is shown as cities have a single letter, large towns and some cities, two letters and small places three letters) where the car and owner are from.

This was the first time I had ever met a French Canadian (at the youth hostel) and was surprised to find that he spoke no English. He was motorbiking around Europe. With the warmer weather I experienced the problem of the Freiburg-am-Breisgau youth hostel: the noisy stream outside that keeps you awake.

It was seeing all the wonderful wooden toys and being told that if your foot slipped into the stream channels that run alongside the roads throughout the town that you were destined to marry a woman from the town, I think that prompted my thoughts. Also I think Becky, in the third year of her degree was thinking ahead to her future with the boyfriend she was going to visit and the possibility of them raising a family in West Germany, that got me all wrapped up in my own fantasies. This was the first time (of very few) that I ate in a food court and was very impressed by it. Cars and lorries are banned from the centre of Freiburg-am-Breisgau and it looks wonderfully historic, just how you would imagine a German town to appear. The notebook I bought there I used for about the next ten years before it disintegrated. I still have the poster.

It is interesting to note, that even though I had been in West Germany six weeks by this time, the money situation had still not been sorted out and I was desperate for my LEA (Local Education Authority) grant. It shows how poorly everything had been organised. My parents had to send me £50 notes concealed in cards to keep me going. In the end I never opened a bank account as it was so difficult. In those days you needed to be earning DM60,000 (about £25,000 in those days) to get a credit card whereas in the UK they gave them out to every student who opened an account. Of course, having stayed away from suicide only on the promise of partying and sworn not to return to West Germany I had little interest in continuing to attend class and saw no point in learning German. In fact I have never had a use for it since.

Uploading the photos I have been beginning to wonder if it rained almost all the time when I was in West Germany both in 1988 and 1989. I certainly remember my first month in Köln almost having incessant rain which made it even more gloomy.

Friday 12th May 1989

This morning I woke early and after breakfast, dozed then went to Sara's room. After some more breakfast we went into town and looked around the shops, then market and craft stalls. I bought a poster of Freiburg and a small jug as a present, also a replacement notebook. Then we ate in the Markthalle which has a variety of food stalls - Chinese, French, pasta, pizza, potato, Turkish, Asian, champagne, coffee, salad, sweet and so on. I had Chinese stir-fried vegetables and pork. Then we came back and sat talking. A lot of it was irrelevant to me, but it is interesting to see how other students live. After that at around 16.00 Iwent back to the youth hostel which was far less crowded and I got in a larger room with its own shower and toilet and for DM3,- less.

I returned to Sara's room, she and Becky had been shopping and we had the usual tomato-sweetcorn-pasta mix and some tasty yoghurts. We talked some more. It seems that people on a year abroad have terrible problems with their relationships and spend a lot of time contacting their fellow students and travelling to see them. After dinner we caught the tram into town and went around a trendy pub, then a studenty one, before meeting Peter in the cellar of a traditional pub. We came back by tram.

I had telephoned Dad before going into the last pub and he said my grant had arrived alright and he is sending mr £200 in cash next week with which I will open an account and it will make other transfers easier. He asked how much work I was doing which combined with Mum saying I should do some German lessons has put me to worrying again. Tomrorrow us three [me, Becky and Sara] are going to the 'Mitfahr' an agency which puts hitchers and drivers together. It costs us DM8.50 each.

Weather: Rainy at first, sunny and warm later.

Pedestrianised Street in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, West Germany in May 1989

Stalls in Freiburg-am-Breisgau Market, May 1989

Becky and Sara Looking at Stall Selling Wooden Toys in Freiburg-am-Breisgau, May 1989

Notice the very Eighties style padded jackets with geometric patterns.

20 Years On: Part 1 of Account of Hitch-hiking through southern West Germany

I have said before that I often envy those people in a position to put up accounts and photos of their trips to various parts of the World and last August/September I posted entries from my diary and photos from my trip by train through West Germany and Austria twenty years to the day in 1988. I then thought of another trip that I made it what was then West Germany in May 1989, the only time I ever went on a hitch-hiking trip anywhere. I had been living in Köln since the start of April and was to remain there until late July. This was part of an exchange organised by my university and funded by the European Community's (predecessor of the EU) ERASMUS scheme which apparently still runs today. This meant I took out a term (we had three terms in those days in a university year rather than the semesters of now) and went to study at a German university. My department was very poorly set up for the trip because they expected me still to submit all my course essays from West Germany even though I would be attending lectures there on different subjects rather than my subject lectures back in Britain. They also did not take into consideration that I would miss the examination period, so I had to do the examinations with the people doing resits in September.

I was the only person who applied to go on the trip to West Germany, everyone else knew that it would damage their grades for their degree. I was keen to get away from the house I was sharing where the landlord's step-daughter, a Music student-teacher at our university, who lived there, was making my life a misery. My parents were always nagging me to go abroad, they were constantly trying to get me to emigrate. These reasons are why I broke my promise of the previous September never to set foot in West Germany again. My department had to send me otherwise it would have had to go back to the university to say, no it could not use the grant ERASMUS was giving and it should go to another department. So off I went with very poor German skills. West German universities are in sharp contrast to British ones, there were no personal tutors for pastoral care and students were very much left to themselves. My university was seen as a large one in the UK, with 6,500 students, Köln University had 53,000 students, the English department alone had half as many students as my entire home university.

I was lucky to be allocated a room in the 'foreigners' block' outside the city limits, because the accommodation office, behind a thick, black steel door was only open one hour per day. Being in a suburban area, West of the city, we encountered great prejudice and dealing with the local government bureaucracy took almost the whole of my first month in Köln. The local council took my passport and only returned it when me and other British students got the British consulate in Düsseldorf involved. Government offices in West Germany were only open three hours per day, longer on Thursdays and the staff were openly racist and xenophobic; even the university administration was hostile to foreign students and one woman staffing the desk in the university registry told me, English, 'get back on the ferry!', I said 'Das ist nicht möglich!' (that is not possible) which I think was a twist of a quote. Ironically I had almost ended up in the West German Army (the Bundeswehr) because I was at Köln station the day young men were being sent off to their military camps and I was there aged 21 with a suitcase and they assumed I was only pretending to be British to escape national service. I fled on the first local train I could get on having been pursued by the Feldjäger (Military Police).

While in Köln I attended a conference about the ERASMUS exchange system which asked why only 1 British student came to West Germany for every 8 West German students who went to British universities. I was able to give them a long list of reasons not only from personal experience. Since then I have read loads of articles about how difficult and depressing it is to go abroad during your degree, because university is handled so differently in various countries. For the British it is the toughest as our universities have the best pastoral care and we are the least travelled people of any country sending students abroad. The liaison women for me and other British students, Monika, described going to a West German university as like 'being parachuted into jungle warfare' and I could not describe it better myself.

I was so depressed by my reception that I tried to hang myself on the second day that I was at the university. The only reason why I stepped down from where I was standing on the foot of my bed with the noose around my neck, tied to a hook in the ceiling was that I had been given £670 by ERASMUS and received a grant of £280 per term all of which went on my rent of the room. I thought I might as well spend the ERASMUS money before killing myself. Being in the foreigners' block (well, in fact blocks, they were two 13-storey blocks of rooms) meant that there were a lot of British and Irish and foreigner-friendly Germans around and I made a good group of friends, I nicknamed 'The Raj'. Even though they were all doing German or French & German degrees they rarely spoke German and never attended many classes so we spent our time drinking beer, partying and picnicking. I embarrassed myself attending classes as I could not properly understand even what our liaison woman, Monika, was saying and in the Politics classes I taught, which were taught in English, the tutors could not understand my English accent.

Anyway with £670 of ERASMUS money, £280 of British local education authority money and £250 brought and sent from home, after the first month, I was able to have an enjoyable, drunken time and survived to return to the UK. My university had worried I would 'go native' and stay in West Germany and get a job (apparently one predecessor of mine had been found working on a pig farm). However, the opposite was the case. Without the bribe I would have come home after the first week. My treatment in West Germany built up such a resentment, that though I made friends I have kept in contact up until the 2000s, I swore not to return. I did not go abroad again for six years and I did not go back to Germany until 2004, by which time it was no longer West Germany and the scars of the trip had been able to heal a little. The trip did purge me of any desire to live abroad again and I ignored all the pressure from my parents to emigrate. When I foolishly took a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) qualification, I realised I could only get a job teaching in Britain as the thought of being alone in some European city utterly terrified me, to the extent that completing the course I had nightmares about being back in Köln during that first month.

Anyway, this is a huge background to what is going to be an account of a very short trip. In May 1989, Becky one of the other British students there, wanted to go and visit her boyfriend who was on a similar trip in Innsbruck in Austria. She also wanted to visit friends from her home university who were at universities across southern West Germany. She did not have the money for a train ticket (and being in West Germany we could not get an Inter-Rail ticket which would cover West Germany, there was always that home country rule) but she was an incredibly experienced hitch-hiker having been all over Europe and experiencing lots of exploits which I may recount on another occasion, but she wanted someone (male or female) to travel with her for safety. I had intended to go to Hamburg (though in fact given there was only 5 months until the Berlin Wall came down I should have gone to West Berlin) but agreed to accompany her, so for the second time in 8 months I set off for Freiburg-am-Breisgau but this time hitch-hiking. I fell in love with the town again and foolishly, not yearning for Melissa this time, dreamt of meeting a nice German woman and having a family there. Given the hostility I experienced in West Germany even attempting something like that would have led to more abuse than even the level I have experienced in my town here in the UK.

Hitch-hiking was very common for students in those days, my university's students' union ran sponsored hitch-hikes across Europe for charity, but it was something that terrified me and Becky's stories did not help. Anyway, even though this trip was trouble-free I never did it again, probably sensible given my luck.

I remember Becky was annoyed because the first man, in his early thirties, who gave us a lift invited us to a wedding for when we got back to Köln, but I refused to go as I found such a random invitation embarrassing and had no desire to attend a wedding of strangers speaking a language, which, by now I knew for certain I would never grasp. The second man was surprised to find Becky spoke German and was British, he assumed we were Dutch. He said to us in flawless English that he had heard that in Britain 'only fools and spies speak foreign languages'.



Thursday 11th May 1989

Today I woke up at 07.00 but fell back to sleep and re-woke at 08.15. After breakfast I met up with Becky and we went to the main road to hitch to Freiburg. We were lucky as after only thirty minutes we got a lift to the motorway and then from the service station from a middle-aged ITT employee to just outside Karlsruhe and he was very friendly and bought us some tea and gave us an atlas. Then we had a lorry driver to just outside Freiburg and from there to the centre of town in a battered Mercedes and then by tram to Becky's friend's Sara's hall. Then after chatting we went to the youth hostel which was almost completely full up. Then we went to a studenty pub and had some pasta. We then walked around town looking in the shops and returned to the pub where we were joined by Sara and her boyfriend Peter, then went to another pub. Then I came back to the youth hostel by taxi; Becky is staying in Sara's room.

Weather: Rainy at first, dry later, mild.

River Valley outside Freiburg-am-Breisgau, West Germany in May 1989

This was the 'noisy' river which ran passed the youth hostel. You can see how shallow it is despite its breadth and make out some of the stones on the bottom that made it so noisy.