Florian Fritz feels at home in his adopted home Aying, where he arrived as a young man in 1993 and still lives today – a stone’s throw from the three main saints of the Maypole, church and beer garden. But does the 54-year-old really feel at home? In his recently completed photo and poetry book “Ayinger Color Tabs” he also gives answers to these questions, with a noticeable wink and in verse form. It is an overall humorous, partly thoughtful declaration of love to the “whitest and blueest of all Bavarian communities with the undisputed tallest maypole in Bavaria, Germany, no, probably the world”, as it says in the blurb of the 128-page book.
In the 28 years of his membership in the village, the studied Romanist, who now works as a social worker and heads a department at the city of Munich, has already got to know “1001 places in and around Aying”, as he says. In the meantime he can make sense of this neat patch of earth and the sometimes very headstrong people here, and not just one; He wrote 37 verses and put each one with a suitable picture. The German Photo Book Prize, which he has already won for another work, proves that Fritz is a master of photography. If you leaf through “Ayinger Dabs of Color”, you will be taken on a walk through the Gmoa and stop for example in front of the world championship maypole: “The maypole is quite prominent / in front of the inn, at the point / where the guest runs past / the focus is already on the fresh Helle “Or he looks at the town center from afar:” The road swings in a wide arc, / as if it had been pulled on a string, / through the village and through the middle, / passes the Burschenhütte. / Sixthof, rectory, parlor garden / lie there in the light and wait “.
And of course, the photographer and rhyming smith, who was born in Munich and grew up in Hohenbrunn, also goes into all the celebrities that the place already had with them, such as Putin, Stoiber, Crown Princess Viktoria or the Bavarian footballer at the time, Philipp Lahm, who once married here and drove up with the carriage: “… and crossed Aying in the carriage. / But instead of the desired flooding / the carriage kept getting stuck. / Kids and fans in every corner / Philip fell in the midday light / his nice grin from his face”.
Florian Fritz has already written and illustrated several travel guides and has already published a book of poems and photos entitled “Lebenswert”, in which he expresses his personal view of life and the world in rhymes and pictures. He has been a freelance writer at Müller-Verlag for 15 years. Since he has been in the home office, he has had time to “march around” from place to place in Aying, where stories are played out and excellent templates for poems are available, for example the famous Biersee or even just the Holländerkurve in the town center, which is loud Fritz is called that in the village because the alternative traffic from the A8 runs over it: “The curve is roared through / that everyone in the village can hear it. / At the Wasserhäusl you are free / and press no again.”
As much as the father of two adult daughters loves the country and people in his adopted home, he appreciates the “brutal influx” less, even if little has changed in the town center itself for 30 years, but all the more in the outside areas: “That is not just a matter of fact on the influx of people / the village indulges in the compulsion to gutting. / The logic wants that who gutted, / moves away from the core more and more “, he rhymes in the poem” Stadl-Stall-Syndrom “, in which he refers to the change in the once extensive undeveloped periphery around Aying, where the mass rises massively “all the barns and huts, / stables and pigs, / barns and warehouses, / which sometimes fill the forest with sound at night. / Because instead of stored tractors / have fun party forums there. “
Back to the question of whether the rhyming smith feels at home in Aying after 28 years. There are long-time residents, newcomers and those in the middle – if you are greeted by “those up there”, then you have arrived. He’s greeted, he says. Then he probably didn’t make the mistake about which he explains in the poem “Zugezogen”: “Some people think that they are in a chic costume / you socialize with power. / In the end you are laughed at.”
The volume “Ayinger Farbtupfer” is available in local bookstores as well as online, including in the social bookstore buch7.de, at a price of 17.99 euros.