Deutsche Telekom occasionally pointed out that, strictly speaking, it doesn’t even mean “telephone booth”. So this head-high box, which used to be yellow, then grey-magenta, and which was lying around all over the country. Who had a coin slot that rarely worked and a handset that hung on the cord like a cudgel. “Telephone booth” would be the correct expression. No one under 35 knows what telephony is supposed to be, even though they use their cell phones every day. But a whole cottage just to talk on the phone? The time is up. What remains is nostalgia.
Well, not only. The phone booths are still there, but no one uses them anymore. On January 30 of this year, Telekom switched off all German cells. By software update – a kind of mercy killing for the remaining 12,000 things. Once there were 160,000.
But in some strange ways, telephone booths also find a use in the smartphone age. As bookcases, they can be found in almost every city. In Berlin, a company built tiny discos in old cells – your favorite song by inserting a coin. On the Swabian Alb, an innkeeper turned the little house into an “ice house” and in Scotland, a hotelier put spirits in and claimed to run what is supposedly the smallest bar in the world. The artist Benedetto Bufalino, on the other hand, once filled London boxes with water, threw in real fish and bam: an aquarium.
Anyone who looks at this diversity in this way will lose their longing for the past. Because let’s be honest: Who would like to stand in a musty cell under the gaze of people waiting and bang the receiver on the fork because the coins fell out for the fifth time? Nostalgia is always a bit of transfiguration.
The tourism service in Grossenrode on the Baltic Sea came up with the latest trick, how the Lübeck news reported: He had an old cell converted into a shower cubicle. With a view of the sea, and through the shower head it rains Baltic Sea water. Hopefully the public outdoor pool shower has had its day.
Read more episodes of the column here.