There are prizes that you can win and still not buy anything from them. Perhaps the best-known award of this kind is known in the Bundesliga in the form of the autumn champion: a title that catches the eye at first, but which, on closer inspection, does not bring its wearer a shell – but at the end of the season there is frustration if he should not be the first to reach the goal in the table to have.
Waldmünchen in the district of Cham can now look forward to a similarly dubious award: the place is considered the darkest in all of Germany. Because according to a balance sheet for the first half of winter, nowhere else has the sun shone so little since the beginning of December, namely only around 30 hours. This means that Waldmünchen only achieves 16 percent of its winter sun target. That’s not very much, especially considering the motto “sun-clear”, which is welcomed on the city’s website, among other things. The mayor assured the BR that it did not feel particularly dark in Waldmünchen. But the news of the gloomy Bavarian Forest town had already seen the light of day in the news world. Even the local news portal Idowa apparently couldn’t resist a side swipe and headlined: “Zappenduster”.
As is well known, whoever has suffered the damage does not have to worry about the ridicule. The Waldmünchner can therefore buy little from the repeatedly mentioned hint that the days are getting longer again, so even with them there will be more light at some point. Yet the dark – and with it the cold – can also be stimulating. In this respect, the Bavarian Forest, which is so passionately gloomy in winter, has already inspired many an artist. The poet Adalbert Stifter, for example, observed a snowstorm of biblical proportions there, which must have permanently darkened the world he saw: “There was a mixture of impenetrable gray and white, of light and twilight, of day and night, which was constantly stirring and confused raged.” For younger, be on the rappers from spruce cartel and her homeland anthem “Woid oida”. “I’m a boy from the Bavarian Forest,” it says, “there’s nine months of winter and three months of cold.”