No one available, no one on the move: between the years it is quiet in the district of Munich, even during the summer holidays.
It’s so quiet here. Incredibly quiet. No phone rings. No phone vibrates. Who should also report? Have you ever tried to call someone yourself? If you do, you will have noticed: Nobody answers. Not at any authority, not in secretariats or practices, not in companies either. E-mails come to nothing, the out-of-office notice is in the mailbox before the message has even been sent. In the supermarket car park on Grünwalder Weg in Unterhaching you can easily get a front-row parking space and you can go for a walk in the Würmtal without meeting anyone. Hellooo? where is everyone? Someone pulled the plug here. The world stopped. We are between the years.
Those who always wait in vain for the stade time in Advent can be assured: they have gotten the date wrong for years. There is only real peace between Christmas and Epiphany – with the exception of New Year’s Eve. A collective retreat into the private sphere takes place until January 6th. Against this winter rigidity, the summer lethargy in August and the peace during the Pentecost holidays due to the traditional mass travel are not worth mentioning.
“Between the years” is actually nonsense when viewed soberly or from an accounting point of view. You are either still in the old year or already in the new year. There is simply nothing in between. At best, this nothing lies like a blanket of snow over the district. Dampening, decelerating, also mystical. But as far as the rough nights are concerned, which are known to be scheduled for exactly these days, one should not feel too safe in the Munich district either. During this time, it is said, the demons are active and the gate to the underworld is open. The Wild Hunt sweeps the land. Nobody should claim that they didn’t notice the storm and that the whole tradition is something for remote Alpine valleys or the stage of the culture and congress center in Taufkirchen, where the mystical “Bavarian Rauhnacht” will be performed on Sunday. In Unterschleißheim, too, people will be secretly happy that the city council has moved away from turning off the street lights to save energy.
But most of them do it like our ancestors anyway, stay at home during the rough nights and do nothing. Just nothing. Nothing at all. Like “Hermann” in Loriot’s sketch “Feierabend” from 1977, who repeatedly assures his hyperactive wife: “I just want to sit here…”. Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking was of the same opinion: “It’s wonderful to be lazy! And then you have to have time to just sit there and look straight ahead.” The good news in this new year: This year, January 6th fell on a Friday and so you can go into a two-day extension with what Gerhard Polt, who was enthusiastic about doing nothing, once called “trolling around”. The phone didn’t ring again until January 9th.